Year of the linux, again

As was posted somewhere else, every year someone proclaims "this is the year linux....." blah blah insert expletive. The way I see it every year this century has been "the year of linux", especially since 2003 when Fedora came to light. The masses of linux distros has every year pushed the boundaries of open source computing and desktop use. It's not the leaps and bounds that windows users experience but incremental. Small steps is the way to go, easing your way into some new or innovative to do something. Ubuntu and Canonical push out two versions every year with better under the hood and visual mechanics, Fedora pushes it further with bleeding edge software twice a year. Mandriva keeps it simple and has in my opinion the best control center bar none, again with major updates twice a year. Instead of waiting three years and getting a ton of changes, risking breakage and driver issues; linux distros keep the tap open at a small trickle.

Finally got a job

Last year this time I finally started a job that required my degree, whew!

This job (I won't say where, not important) uses a mix of operating systems and other hardware. Thank goodness my supervisor is a fan of linux and likes to push for it when he can.

No new reviews

So that's it PCMag? Give up on linux?

in reference to: Linux - Reviews and Price Comparisons from PC Magazine (view on Google Sidewiki)

Best Free of 2009?

You're kidding right? Three linux distros and you're done? So you just put them here to say "see we covered linux". Even for Ubuntu you didn't even have anything from 2009 and the link is for a review of 8.04?

in reference to: The Best Free Software of 2009 - Operating Systems - Features by PC Magazine (view on Google Sidewiki)

Sidewiki

I'm going to try Sidewiki on my home system as well

in reference to: Google Sidewiki (view on Google Sidewiki)

Teasing PC users

You know, I just love the fact that my wife had to run a defrag on her PC running Windows XP Home and it still didn't complete defrag the drive. Why is that? I have never had to or intend to defrag a linux install. There is no need because the filesystem is just that well created. It is by default a much more security OS as well.

Fat, fatter, fattest

This is an excellent article on the mentality of Microsoft. As hardware gets faster and better, Windows/Office has gobbled up every bit of it and keeps asking for more. If the stories of Windows 7 are true ( and I hope they are ) it might be enough to turn things around. In the meantime Linux and MacOSX have continued to optimize, improve and fill the holes. If the programmers and users of Linux can get together and create an interface that is both easy to use and advanced with automated features; combining the light resource load of XFC, advanced features of GNOME and easy to use interface of KDE; that would be the knockout punch.

Judging by this article the tipping point was Office XP with Windows XP SP1, after that the scales really started tipping down. Adding more code for security to patch holes that should not have existed to begin with. More code added to Office, bigger memory requirements. When Vista was released the hardware requirements were drastically increased by 25% more that previous versions. Seven years is a long time to update an OS. Windows is incredibly bloated. In seven years KDE has updated itself to KDE3 and release five major update, GNOME has pushed itself up to 2.18 and the kernel itself has put out a major update 2.6 and release 20 updates. Mandriva has gone from Mandrake 10 to Mandriva 2008.1 with 7 updates inbetween. Even Debian with it's long dev/testing cycle has managed to release two versions, Sarge and Etch.

What Microsoft added to Vista? DRM, Aero, security, search? Not all that much when you look at it seriously. Apple has consistently evolved their OS. OSX 10 through 10.4; four major updates, increased security, better features; all without increasing the load on the computer itself. I can't say much about it since I don't use a Mac. Linux is releasing new/update version on a more or less six month release schedule. New features added since 2001: udev, compiz, journalling file systems, virtualization, easy to use package management, security features; innovation is coming from the opensource community at an ever increasing pace. Looking at distros from 2001 and today are like night and day.