Links: GNU/Linux Desktop Merits Noted, Canonical Spreads Proprietary IBM Software
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-21 15:47:00 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-21 15:47:00 UTC
Summary: Further catch-up with GNU/Linux news (mostly from last week)
GNU/Linux
Currently, Linux systems take the very high end machines (any machine more powerful than a fully tricked out MacPro {read supercomputers and mainframes}) and the very low end machines (phones, routers, palm-tops, PVRs).
There's almost nothing that desktop Linux can't do. A modern Linux desktop is probably a better choice for 95% of the heavy Internet service using population than the big commercial behemoth that dominates the desktop. I'm not saying Windows doesn't have its place or that it doesn't do the job for a lot of people, but Linux is better, faster, stronger, safer, and sexier than anything else out there. It's cool. It rocks. It dramatically increases your sex appeal. And if you've got a 64 bit processor instead of 32, that goes double. What more do you want?
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Fun
You’ve seen the wobbly windows, you’ve seen the cube, you’ve seen the raindrops. Compiz is just a bunch of useless eye candy right? Wrong. While the flashy effects get most of the attention, Compiz is a top-notch window manager in its own right. In fact, it’s got so many workspace and window management tools that many people use Compiz for years without ever knowing about some of the most useful features. This guide will cover each of the best window management plugins for Compiz and explain how each can be used to create a more productive desktop, with or without wobbly windows.
Linux, which I'm using at the moment, comes with a pretty standard blue-themed Gnome desktop common to several distros- Debian, Mandriva and Fedora- distinguished only by a branded wallpaper.
It's a simple and elegant theme, but over the last few days I've been customising my desktop, changing the theme and icons. The new theme is a dark one which I think suits my laptop with its grey-bordered screen.
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Desktop
Even I have done it. I don't think you can be a Linux blogger without having done at least one post about how this year is the year the Linux desktop will take over the world. However, no matter how many people seem to write about it. The year the Linux desktop takes over the world always seems to fall through the cracks. Sometimes I think that there must be some Pinky foiling the Linux Brains plans :)
But! The pundits cry, Linux is gaining market share every year. Surely it will win the Linux desktop prize soon. Nay! Say the naysayers, at the rate Linux is gaining desktop market share even those not born yet will have one foot in the grave before Linux has any significant rating. Which one is right?
GNU/Linux has the answer to these annoyances, and it is this: they are simply not there. Why? Because the software is written by developers that are not trying to sell you something.
It's an old joke by now that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop – just like last year, and the year before that. But now there's a new twist: that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux smartphone – with the difference that it's really happening.
That's mainly being driven by the huge success of the Linux-based Android system, but it's not the only open source system here. There's also webOS and MeeGo, both of which have their loyal fans. What that means is that whichever of these takes off, the open source world will benefit.
[...]
If Baidu does come out with its own Android rival, that could help to achieve two things. It would finally take open source into the Chinese mainstream, and help to ensure that Linux unequivocally becomes the world's leading operating system for smartphones - if not on the desktop.
Almost all school children in Portugal are becoming familiar with using open source, including the Linux operating system, says Paulo Trezentos, founder of Caixa Mágica Software.
By the end of this year, the company's eponymous Linux-based operating system will have been installed on 890,000 school PCs and school laptops, he says. "In a country with a population of 10 million, this means that Linux is reaching the majority of the young people."
In the almost 20 years since Linux was first released into the world, free for anyone to use and modify however they like, the operating system has been put to a lot of uses. Today, a vast number of servers run Linux to serve up Web pages and applications, while user-friendly versions of Linux run PCs, netbooks, and even Android and WebOS phones.
One incredibly useful way that Linux has been adapted to the needs of modern computer users is as a "live CD," a version of the operating system that can be booted from a CD (or a DVD or, in some cases, a USB drive) without actually being installed on the computer's hard drive. Given the massive RAM and fast CPUs available on even the lowest-end computers today, along with Linux's generally lower system requirements compared to Windows and Mac OS X, you can run Linux quite comfortably from a CD drive.
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Server
Canonical is offering enterprises a chance to try cloud computing via a virtual appliance that bundles Ubuntu Linux with the IBM DB2 Express-C database running on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) public cloud platform.
The free appliance, which features Ubuntu Server Edition 10.04, also can be deployed in private cloud configurations.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Turns Out LLMs for Code Don't Save Time and Don't Improve Quality
- Neither legal nor useful
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- Pissing Contests and Pissing Off Everyone
- people who came from Microsoft are trying to vex and divide the community
- Microsoft Repeats the Mistakes Made by the EPO After We Exposed a Major Microsoft/EPO Scandal 10 Years Ago
- That scandal was all over the media, not just in English
- The Demise of LLMs
- We've just checked BetaNews again. They've dropped all the slop and went back to human authors.
- Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Sonpo Museum of Art and FCEUX
- Links for the day
- Links 13/07/2025: UnitedHealth's Censorship Campaign, Australia Wary of China
- Links for the day
- Firing Away With Nonsense
- Or fighting fire with fire
- Links 13/07/2025: Climate Crisis, GAFAM Poisoning the Water
- Links for the day
- The Microsofters Will Have an Obligation to Compensate Us
- This story isn't just about Microsoft. It's also about corruption, there are many women victims, there is abject "abuse of process", and many more scandals to be illuminated in years to come.
- Reproducing at the EPO Instead of Producing Monopolies for Foreign Monopolies With Their Price-Fixing Cartels
- Does the EPO recognise the need of well-educated Europeans to bear kids?
- Valnet Inc. Dominates Real (Not LLM Slop) GNU/Linux Coverage in 2025
- And likely in prior years, too
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Fund Raiser Goes on
- Later this month we'll expose another OSI scandal
- EPO Staff Representatives Issue a Warning About Staff's Health and Inadequate Care
- Even the EPO's own stakeholders (money sources) are openly protesting against what the EPO became
- Links 13/07/2025: Partly Assorted News From Deutsche Welle and CBC
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Board Games and Battle Styles
- Gemini Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 12, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, July 12, 2025
- Plunder at the Second-Largest Institution in Europe
- cuts, neglect, health problems, even early deaths
- Links 12/07/2025: Political Developments, Attack on Opposition, Climate Actions
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 12/07/2025: Melodic Musings and Small Web July
- Links for the day
- Links 12/07/2025: Jail in China for Homoerotica, South Korea Discriminates Against Old Workers
- Links for the day
- If Only Everything Was Rewritten in Rust, We'd Have No More Security Issues?
- Nope.
- Links 12/07/2025: Birdwatching and Fake/Misleading Wall Street 'Valuation' Figures
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 12/07/2025: How to Avoid Writing, Apps for Android
- Links for the day
- Using SLAPPs to Cover Up Sexual Abuse and Strangulation
- The exact same legal team of the Serial Strangler from Microsoft and Garrett already has a history fighting against "metoo"
- EPO Staff Committee on Harassment in the Workplace
- slides
- Adding the Voice of Writers to UK SLAPP Reform
- The journey to repair antiquated (monarchy era) laws will likely be long
- EPO Takes More Money From Staff for Speculation (Pensions), Actuarial Study Explains the Impact
- "The key change in this year’s Actuarial Study, due to cascading the new “risk appetite” from the financial study, is a significant increase of the total pension contribution rate of 5.7 percentage points, up to a total of 37.8%. This is driven by an unprecedented decrease in the discount rate of 105 bps down to 2.2%."
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 11, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, July 11, 2025
- Microsoft - Like IBM - Does the "Relocation" Tricks (Start Over Elsewhere, Then Get Sacked by Microsoft)
- It is a "low blow" or a "dick move"
- After the Free Software Foundation's Campaign to Raise Money Let's See Campaigns to Finish Off Microsoft (Vista 11, GitHub etc.)
- Microsoft is in effect collapsing
- Your Publications Have No Major Impact Unless or Until You "Get Some Heat"
- we're on the right track
- Slopwatch: A Cause for Hope, the Hype is Dying
- For about a month we showed that becoming a slopfarm - for several weeks - resulted in utter failure and ruin for BetaNews
- Links 11/07/2025: Censorship Worsening, 3D Printing Success Stories, UK and France Unite Around Nukes
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 11/07/2025: Zorin OS and Scriptonite Updates
- Links for the day
- Links 11/07/2025: Hardware, Russia, and China
- Links for the day
- Links 11/07/2025: Intel Collapsing and Microsoft Resorts to Bribery to Push Slop Via Obligatory Education
- Links for the day
- The EFF Sided With the Team That Strangles Women and Tells Women to Kill Themselves
- They say that apathy and inaction are a form of a "stance"
- "Nat [Friedman] and [the Serial Strangler From Microsoft] Were Always Exceptionally Close," Says Former Housemate and Colleague
- Now Alex (hiding behind another name when that suits him) not only attacks women but also people who merely report what he did to women
- Exemplary List of Things That Are Not Artificial Intelligence or Even Intelligence
- The "age of AI" or "era of AI" or "AI revolution" mostly boils down to rebranding, just like "the cloud"
- New Letter From the European Patent Office Explains How the Office Plots to Grant Many Illegal Patents, a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of 'Growth'
- Open letter to Mr Rowan (VP1) and Mr Aledo Lopez (COO)
- Abuse of Process
- 5RB is employing people who help violent men
- What Microsoft's Nat Friedman and Microsoft Lunduke Have in Common
- "Get in da car; No time to explain, loser"
- Microsoft and IBM Don't Have Much of a Future (They Mostly Pretend at This Point)
- IBM and Microsoft are in some ways alike but in many ways different
- It's Not Just Twitter (or X.com) That's Dying, Microsoft's Equivalent is Dying Also
- Unable to find a business model
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- Some publicly available information suggests that even for each paid subscriber for plagiarism (LLM 'coding') GitHub Copilot still loses more money than it makes
- Wayland is Bad for the Planet
- If you use Wayland, it'll take you longer to accomplish tasks and you will consume more energy (or battery life)
- Legitimising Those Who Sabotage You
- Microsoft is a very malicious company
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 10, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, July 10, 2025
- On Microsoft Layoffs
- we might be looking at about 60,000 Microsoft layoffs since 2023
- EPO Management Already Breaks Its Own Promise (Lie) on "Bringing Teams Together"
- This gut-punching move happened just 2 days ago
- Gemini Links 11/07/2025: Occupation of 2025 and "Old Man Yells At Soundcloud"
- Links for the day
- Our Lawsuits Against the 'Cancel Mob' (Ringleaders) Helped Reduce Anti-Free Software Online Abuse
- That's not to say that lawsuits are the best way to handle terrible people. But that can help.