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40,000 lines of flawed code almost made it into FreeBSD's kernel—we examine how.

Normally, at the end of the year, I tend to run my best annual distro roundups, choosing the finest among five operating systems or flavors thereof that showed the greatest promise in terms of stability, usability, elegance, support, and other curious items in the outgoing twelve-month period. But I have never dedicated much thought to selecting the best implementation of any one particular desktop environment, regardless of the system underneath.

Once upon a time Linux had what I think was the best music player/manager, its name was Amarok and people even brought it up as a way to try convince others to move to Linux, intelligent playlists, auto fetching of cover arts, lyrics, last.fm integration, etc, and it was great. Fast forward a few years (almost a decade to be fair) and now Amarok and all KDE music players seems to be lacking, with KDE 5.0 maybe this is the time to fix it.

Until about a year ago, I considered the Xfce desktop to be boring and bland and not that beautiful. I never thought it could be a decent contender for the likes of KDE and Gnome. Then, one day everything changed. It was the day Gnome 3 was born, and I figured that my favorite choice for the desktop environment was gone now, living in the shadows. While a few distributions still cling to the good ole Gnome 2, and there’s the MATE reincarnation, the landscape has been forever changed.

I’ve not been very good about posting updates on this GNOME development cycle. I was busy with other things, and all of a sudden, we’re already at the beta – I’ve just released 3.9.90, which is the first beta release.

High time to show some of the nice new things that will come in GNOME 3.10.

Ever since I started contributing to the Fedora Project I’ve always loved the work (still do!). The operating system is flexible (just a bunch of puzzle pieces, really) and that flexibility allows people to build pretty much any type of system they need to get their work done. Everything being licensed under a free and open source license makes all those puzzle pieces very easy to work with as well. In short, what I see in Fedora is what I’ve come to expect from all software solutions.

Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical is seeking $32m in crowdfunding for a smartphone-PC hybrid, the Ubuntu Edge. It's a solution to a problem you can solve more cheaply

Well, well, well, I have never imagined I would be testing a distribution based on another distribution, which mandates that you sacrifice animals on a cold slab of red marble etched with runic symbols and C language just to get the networking running. But Manjaro is unto Arch what Sabayon is unto Gentoo. And so here we are.

I have received maybe half a million requests, all right, maybe three requests to review the distro, and they all promised I would not have to manually monkey my way around the system as if it's a paying job. With this in mind as strict rule no. 4, thou shalt not dabble in unnecessary stuff, I set about testing Manjaro 0.8.5, the almost latest version by the time you read this review. The drama takes place on a T61 box, with Intel graphics and SSD.

I found Igor through Steven Rosenberg, and like Steven says, Igor is both knowledgeable and funny. Igor’s setup is cool because of the variety of hardware and distros he uses. I was most interested in the variety of desktop environments he uses. I find it tough enough flipping between GNOME3 and Windows 7. I’m not sure I’d be able to handle even just a third variable.

We interviewed the founder of PCBSD at Texas Linux Fest. He also works for iX Systems.

After posting a preview screenshot for LXDE-Qt, I got quite a lot of feedback from various sources. Generally the responses from the users are positive, but there are also some people saying that LXDE is no longer lightweight.

Please, in the free world we’re all friends and let’s not spread FUDs to hurt each other. I’m not going to respond to groundless accuse or get involved in toolkit wars. Just see the screenshot.

Several days ago, Microsoft released a public beta of their upcoming Windows 8.1 release, which has previously been known and called Windows Blue. You will be wise to boycott this latest Microsoft operating system thing, because it is an insult to intelligence, to poor people worldwide, and anyone with a basic sense of decency. Final grade: FAIL.

Many users have read about our recent Qt-related work in prior blog posts. The GTK+ version of LXDE is still under development, but we did some experiments with Qt, too. Now I have some things to show you. Here is a preview screenshot for LXDE-Qt.

While there already is a second beta release of KDE 4.11, the next development cycle of the KDE Software Compilation, the team released their final increment (stability and bugfix release) of the 4.10 cycle today. KDE SC 4.10.5 sources were made available online for the larger public – and since I have early access to the sources, I built Slackware 14 packages already.The packages are available on several mirrors, see below. Note that these are built for – and should be used only on – Slackware 14. Pat should hopefully add KDE 4.10.5 to Slackware-current soon. So if you are running our development version of Slackware, just wait for Pat and do not install my packages – they will have issues on -current.

Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it’s against democracy. I had been a member of the lawsuit against data preservation in Germany. I supported the German Pirate Party during the last election campaign because of a new censorship law. That I became a KDE developer is clearly linked to the fact that it is a free software community.

But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too. What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way? After all I still consider civil rights as extremely important. The answer is simple: Fanboys and trolls.

Well, this ought to be interesting. Battle royale, except we have no gentry, just the two seemingly and arguably dominant desktop environments for Linux. In my humble and narrow perception, there has been a dramatic shift in the Linux desktop usage in the past several years. Come the season of Gnome 3, a split happened in the community, breaking the decade old Gnome-KDE dominance. A whole generation of desktop environments was born, forked and knifed. Unity took its own path, Gnome 2 returned as MATE, and Gnome 3 was eclipsed by Cinnamon. Only KDE remained as it was, and now it was facing a new rival.

We shall now commence the second review of Linux Mint 15 Olivia. In the first installment, we played with the distro on top of a T61 laptop, which comes with Intel graphics and two internal SSD. There were no cardinal issues, then again, neither there were any with Ubuntu, which later failed miserably when thrown against the HP machine and its Broadcom Wireless and Nvidia graphics.

All this makes today's effort all the more interesting. Especially since the behavior with other flavors of Ubuntu were not consistent. For example, I did not have any networking related problems with Kubuntu or Xubuntu. Likewise, the infamous kernel crashes only sporadically affected the latter. Nouveau was quiet on both, whereas it wrecked havoc on top of Unity. So with all these in mind, we begin the Cinnamon challenge [sic]. And remember, we will have a MATE review, all proper like, soon.

Since the 2012 summit, Red Hat has been working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 6.5 and 7, including updates to the installer, Fedora 19, file systems and more. We spoke to Denise Dumas, director of software engineering at Red Hat Inc., who outlined some of the upcoming features to be discussed at her Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Roadmap panel at the 2013 Red Hat Summit. Many of the changes have come as a response to user-experience testing performed throughout the intervening year, she said.

All right, time for another Ubuntu review. I am going to test Ubuntu again, on a laptop with some proprietary drivers. This comes after Kubuntu and Xubuntu, both tested running from an external disk connected to my HP Pavilion laptop, equipped with an Nvidia graphics card and Broadcom Wireless. Not the most usual and trivial of setups, especially since it entails several proprietary drivers, which we have not seen in the basic test on the T61 laptop. Ergo, this should be most interesting.

So far, the experience with the 13.04 family was mixed. Some great things, like performance, accompanied with kernel crashes due to bad QA. Overall, somewhat frustrating, as the intermediate releases between LTS editions should be probably be labeled beta, for geeks only. Let's see what gives here.

It is time to test the third sibling in the Ubuntu family, the one named Kubuntu. So far, we've had Ubuntu, which was somewhat bland. Then we also had Xubuntu, which worked like a charm, except for a kernel oops thingie affecting the entire range, a silly thing to coincide with the official release. The KDE version is next.

However, unlike all other tests this spring, I will do something rather unusual. I am going to attempt to upgrade Kubuntu, in-vivo, from Quetzal to Ringtail, using the package manager's internal functionality. True, this kind of review will skip a lot of what I usually demonstrate in the live session and during the installation, but it will expose many other interesting little bits. In general, I always advocated against doing these upgrades, because they were buggy and often ended in a fiasco. What now, you wonder.