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What makes Linux Mint so awesome? That, in itself, is quite a question. After all, why do we use Linux? It's one of those questions that can only be answered from the point of view of an individual's personal approach to their experiences with the operating system itself.

As you might have seen in Jonathan’s blog post we discussed Mir in Kubuntu at the “Mataro Sessions II”. It’s a topic I would have preferred to not have to discuss at all. But the dynamics in the free software world force us to discuss it and obviously our downstream needs to know why we as an upstream do not consider Mir adoption as a valid option.

Yesterdaty I noticed the LibreOffice 4.0.3 release.by chance, and built Slackware 14 packages for it right away (they work on -current just as well).Noteworthy statement in these release notes is “LibreOffice 4.0.3 is another important step in the process of improving the quality and stability of the bleeding edge version of the suite, and facilitating migrations to free software by governments and enterprises“. Relating to that statement, a personal rant is about to burst.

I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous Microsoft developer who contributes to the Windows NT kernel wrote a fantastic and honest response acknowledging this problem and explaining its cause. His post has been deleted! Why the censorship? I am reposting it here. This is too insightful to be ignored. [Edit: The anonymous poster himself deleted his post as he thought it was too cruel and did not help make his point, which is about the social dynamics of spontaneous contribution. However he let me know he does not mind the repost at the condition I redact the SHA1 hash info, which I did.]

Very often I have to setup new servers or harden existing servers during a security audit. As a result, secure passwords have to be chosen for root, cPanel accounts, etc. There are many composite practices that make a server secure but often overlooked is using secure passwords.

I was on holiday, so I was unable to create the Slackware packages for KDE Software Compilation 4.10.3 any sooner than today. This installment of KDE SC was already added to slackware-current earlier this week, but my packages are specifically for users of the stable release, Slackware 14.

Every once in a while, I crawl out from under the rock that is bugzilla and I try and look around at what others are doing in the distro kernel space. Today I was curious how Fedora and Ubuntu compare in how they configure the kernel. I've long thought that for all the focus the kernel gets, it should be the most boring package in an entire distro. It should work, work well, and that is about it. It isn't there to differentiate your distro. It's there to let your distro run. So, will my personal belief stand up, or would I find something in the configs that proves one "distro" is better than another? Let's dive in.

Time to review Xubuntu, a proud member of the Ubuntu family. And it's just had a new son born this spring, named Billy Bob Raring Jr. Anyhow, there are two critical aspects to this article. One, Ubuntu's been offering a fairly bland experience these past two releases, with subpar Nvidia experience and too many bugs. Two, Xubuntu has been on a steady rise ever since Pangolin, and I even added it to my best list at the end of the last year. So let's see what gives. This time I will be a using a somewhat different approach. Instead of testing on the T61 laptop, which comes with a cheap graphics card and no hardware that requires additional proprietary drivers, I will begin with the HP Pavilion laptop. This machine has both a Broadcom Wireless, as well an Nvidia card. Double jeopardy.

Or maybe it should read the other way around, unremarkably remarkable. Which one is it? Well, I don't know, take a look and judge for yourself. Now, the mandatory two paragraphs of introduction. For me, Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal was a fairly big flop. And it was nothing short of a disaster on my high-endish machine, where the Nvidia graphics stack was bonkered. It's been six months since, so it's time for another round of Ubuntu fun, or maybe, lack thereof, we shall see. Meanwhile, a lot of things have happened, like the fact there's now Steam for Ubuntu, which is a big and awesome revolution for us gamers, and I'm running a Ubuntu phone contest for those of you not lazy enough to read books. So yes, enough with introductions, let's rock.

In the general discussion about “lightweight” desktop environments I have read a few times that one should disable Compositing in KWin. That’s done in Kubuntu’s low-fat settings package and also something Jos talked about in the context of Klyde. I have never seen an explanation on why Compositing should matter at all. It mostly boils down to “OpenGL is evil” and “I don’t want 3D”. So let’s leave the “educated guesses” behind us and have a proper look to the question whether Compositing matters for “lightweight”. (Remember: lightweight is a buzz-word without any meaning.)

On April 21, members of the Fuduntu team that are involved with the creation of the new post-Fuduntu distro met in #fuduntu on IRC to discuss some key aspects of the new distro. This was a public meeting and members of the community were invited to join in the discussion.

The GNOME 3.8 release kept me pretty busy. In the run up to UI freeze I was focusing on tracking bugs, providing guidance and testing. Then it was marketing time, and I was spending all my time writing the release notes as well as some of the website. (Kudos to the marketing team for a great 3.8 release, btw.) With 3.8 behind me, I’ve been able to turn back to some good honest design work. I’ve been looking at quite a few aspects of GNOME 3, including Settings and GNOME Shell. However, in this post I am going to focus on some of the application design activities that I have been involved in recently. One of the nice things here is that I have found the opportunity to fill in some gaps and pay some attention to some of the long-lost applications that are in need of design love.

In a galaxy far far away, long before there was Android en masse, long before touch was popular, I mean retro-popular, because we have been using the touch technology for at least two million years, long before there was any modern, simplistic interface for smartphones and tablets, there was KDE. It’s all in the name. KDE is one of the few remaining staple desktop environments of the Linux world. It’s been around forever, and it does not seem to be slowing down. In fact, it’s evolving and growing. So far so good. One big thing that sticks to KDE is its spartan name. KDE, as the acronym aptly puts it, is a desktop environment, but this very nomenclature underlines what this graphical computing framework is all about. And perhaps therein lies the rub. Oh, we are getting ahead of ourselves, and you may be wondering what this article is all about. Perhaps I should tell you, it’s about KDE, a desktop environment, being a great choice for non-desktop systems. There, I wrote it.

I've always had a little bit of "distrohopper" in me. I'd usually get bored and want to try something new after reading about it.

Almost always I end up back on Ubuntu after a while. I've really been using Ubuntu pretty much exclusively since 2005.

Last year I switched exclusively to Fedora for a while (about 9 months) because I was having to use RHEL/CentOS at work and needed to learn more about it. It was painful for me, not because Fedora is bad or anything, it's just not my ideal desktop distribution. It was the longest I'd ever stuck with something besides Ubuntu. As soon as I was comfortable with the Red Hat tool-set (and the fact I moved from being a Server Admin to a Software Developer at work), I moved back to Ubuntu.

Is heartwarming to see people writing Free software and is understandable newbie developers will create less than perfect applications, still there are some apps which should never be written, and in this category I include the "scripts" supposed to install and do "everything" on your distro, from installing Flash and codecs to... $DEITY knows what.

After posting my Pantheon DE review, a lot of people emailed me, telling me that what I did was wrong, namely install this desktop environment from a PPA and run it on top of a Ubuntu desktop. All right then, so what should I have done, I asked politely. They said, test elementary OS, which is a Ubuntu fork all right, with the Pantheon desktop environment on top it. Aha. Same thing? Supposedly not. Go figure. I did test elementary in its very first incarnation two years back. Now, the increment has gone up a notch, from 0.1 to 0.2, and it's time to pulsecheck the progress of this distribution, one of the few that hail minimalism as their ultimate goal. Can it be done, without hurting the user, and everything else. We shall see. Follow me, lasses and gents.

I swapped an old hard drive into the HP Pavilion g6-2210us and gave a few Linux distros a spin today. Why a separate drive? I’m not at all confident about a successful Linux-Windows 8 dual boot.

Katherine is involved in a lot of great Linux initiatives. I strongly recommend her Twitter feed, which usually has a few interesting links per day. Katherine is also another subject who says her setup is close to ideal, which is always nice, and impressive, to hear. Also, despite the fact that I might seem obsessed with Fuduntu, it’s just a coincidence that Katherine uses it.

A former employee of Hostgator has been arrested and charged with installing a backdoor that gave him almost unfettered control over more than 2,700 servers belonging to the widely used Web hosting provider.

Praised, cursed, often misunderstood, what are KDE's semantic desktop tools for anyway? The idea of taking the myriad kinds of information stored on a computer, and trying to find the relationships between it so it's more usable, has been around for a long time. "Semantics", the dictionary tells us, "is the study of meaning". The goal of a "semantic desktop" is to take all the bits and pieces of information we as users collect over time, and make it more meaningful, and ultimately more useful.