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Takeaway: Is the Linux desktop really a “mess” as some pundits call it? Jack Wallen takes issue with this claim and explains why he thinks the desktop is getting a bad rap. It seems nearly every pundit, every mouthpiece on the planet has decided that the Linux desktop is a “mess.” This “downfall” of the Linux desktop started with GNOME 3 and seemed to gain more momentum with Ubuntu Unity. I have a theory — and an idea for a fix.Linux is all about choice. It’s always been that way; from the earliest inception of the desktop, the Linux community...

Steve McIntyre and the Linaro Enterprise Group recently analyzed Ubuntu and Fedora software packages to see what software was still relying upon hand-written Assembly code. This was done to see how much real Assembly is being used, to see what the code was used for, and whether it was worth porting to 64-bit ARM / AArch64 / ARMv8. Their findings found that most software doesn't need porting for 64-bit ARM but that "most software in the typical Linux distribution does not contain any assembly." For Ubuntu 13.04, only about 6% of the packages contained any Assembly code. With packages found...

The maintainers of the native Linux port of the ZFS high-reliability filesystem have announced that the most recent release, version 0.6.1, is officially ready for production use. "Over two years of use by real users has convinced us ZoL [ZFS on Linux] is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super computers," developer Brian Behlendorf wrote in a mailing list post on Wednesday. ZFS is a combined filesystem and volume manager for Unix-like operating systems, originally developed by Sun Microsystems for its Solaris OS in the early 2000s. The main features that set ZFS apart from many competing filesystems are...

The lawyer who has filed a complaint with the European Commission against secure boot in Windows 8 on  behalf of some 8000 Linux users in Spain says the complaint takes "an user and developer perspective, it is an unprecedented approach to the problem of monopoly in operating systems in Europe"."I think that Hispalinux is likely to show that Microsoft is engaged in additional anticompetitive acts that were not conclusively determined in the 1998 European Commission investigation," José Maria Lancho (pictured above) told iTWire.Hispalinux is the organisation on whose behalf Lancho has filed the complaint; according to him, it is a...

Have you been looking for a job, or extra work on the side, and getting ever more frustrated even though the job market is turning up? While the market is improving, it's still a tough environment out there, especially for college graduates who have little experience on their resumes. The good news is that a number of recent surveys and studies show that open source skills are in increasing demand at many organizations. In the latest example of these reports, Dice.com and The Linux Foundation surveyed more than 850 global hiring managers and 2,600 Linux professionals, finding that Linux skills,...

Gnome project cofounder and current Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza says he's done wrestling with Linux on the desktop, and that he now uses Apple kit exclusively for all of his workstation needs. De Icaza is well known in the open source community for developing a number of client-side technologies for Linux, including the Midnight Commander file shell, the Gnome desktop environment, and the Mono project. But in a blog post on Tuesday, de Icaza wrote that not only does he no longer use Linux for his day-to-day computing needs, but he hasn't actually booted his Linux workstation since October...

A rift may be forming between Piston Console maker Xi3 and Valve. A partially transparent veil of secrecy hangs over Xi3's pint-sized Piston Console. When first unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year, some surmised it was the official Steam Box, though Xi3 never came out and said it. And now that Xi3 is taking pre-orders, there's still no mention of it being a Steam Box, though it's clearly intended for living room gaming using Steam's Big Picture mode. Xi3 released a statement today that adds a little insight into its relationship with Valve, and also hints...

Page 1 of 7After spending the better part of the past week running continuous open-source Linux benchmarks on the Exynos5-powered Google Nexus 10, the first extensive benchmark results for the Nexus 10 tablet running the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview are now available. This performance comparison from Ubuntu on the dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 powered device is compared to numerous other ARMv7 and x86 devices. One of the interesting findings from this new round of ARM Linux testing is that the Google Nexus with its dual-core ARM SoC is competitive with AMD's first-generation Phenom Quad-Core processor for some demanding workloads.

Linaro to Deliver Initial Linux Builds for ARM Servers in 1H 2013 Linaro, the not-for-profit engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM architecture, today announced the formation of the Linaro Networking Group (LNG) with twelve founding member companies including AppliedMicro, ARM, Enea, Freescale, LSI, MontaVista, Nokia Siemens Networks and Texas Instruments (TI) at the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC).With ARM-based SoCs at the heart of the transformation occurring in cloud and mobile infrastructure applications such as switching, routing, base-stations and security, Linaro’s members are collaborating on fundamental software platforms to enable rapid deployment of new services across a range...

Valve Moves a Step Closer to Steam Box, Releases Steam for Ubuntu Valve Software, the owner of Steam video game distributing system, on Thursday announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. The launch of the Steam client for Canonical’s Ubuntu moves Valve a step closer to creation its own Linux-based low-cost personal computers for gaming. What remains to be seen is how well will titles developed with Windows in mind work under different OS."The introduction of Steam to Ubuntu demonstrates growing demand for open systems from gamers and game developers. We expect a growing number of game developers...

It was revealed today at the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) that Intel through their Open-Source Technology Center is currently over two dozen full-time graphics driver developers. They're also looking to hiring more developers. More details on the Intel DRM driver discussions will happen in another Phoronix article, but the head count details they shared were interesting in their own right and worthy of a shout-out -- along with noting they want to hire even more developers. Daniel Vetter was talking about the Intel kernel graphics work on Saturday morning of FOSDEM in Brussels. When asked about the...

There is far more to multi-media production on Linux than GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), the beloved drawing and painting program, though it seems that is all there is because it gets all the attention. GIMP is wonderful, but there is an entire universe of profession-level multi-media creation applications in all creative arenas: drawing and illustration, photography, desktop publishing, music, and movies and videos. Today we'll look at my recommend Linux distributions for multi-media production, graphics creation applications. Then in future installments in this series we'll dive into audio production, video production, CAD, 3D printing, and other industrial programs.Dream Studio...

For many PC users, the prospect of switching away from Mac or Windows and onto Linux can be a nerve-wracking one. After all, Linux holds only a minority share of the desktop market, and not all of us know people who are already using it. The idea of making the switch can often feel like taking a blind leap into the unknown. On the other hand, those of us on Windows are now facing the prospect of Windows 8, which by most accounts is not a happy one. Will it be more painful to jump into Modern UI, with all...

Summary: Is it possible that the recent attempts to push secure boot onto computer users was a response to the growing hardware vendor support for coreboot back in 2011? This is only speculation on my part, but I suspect that this might be the case. Coreboot is a badly needed solution that can restore freedom to  PC users while updating the outdated PC BIOS technology. What is CoreBoot?Coreboot is a free software replacement for the BIOS currently found in most computers. It is also a better alternative than UEFI/secure boot because it gives the owner of a computer the freedom...

Japan gets first dibs Samsung will launch its first Tizen-based smartphone next year and Japanese consumers will get a taste of the new OS first. According to a Japanese daily, the new device will be sold through NTT Docomo and other carriers, starting at some point in 2013. European carriers are also interested in Tizen, including Vodafone and France Telecom.Samsung apparently hopes to build a platform around Tizen, to rival the likes of Apple and Google. High hopes to say the least, but then again we are already hearing rumours of an X phone from Motorola’s skunk works, which is apparently...

Samsung has created a new Linux file system called F2FS. Jaegeuk Kim of Samsung writes on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: F2FS is a new file system carefully designed for the NAND flash memory-based storage devices. We chose a log structure file system approach, but we tried to adapt it to the new form of storage. Also we remedy some known issues of the very old log structured file system, such as snowball effect of wandering tree and high cleaning overhead. Greg KH, the lead Linux kernel developer applauded the file system on his Google+ page, "Sweet, a new...

It's early days for secure boot, the new method that Microsoft is using to protect its desktop turf, but it would not be unfair to say that the company has succeeded in showing up the sharply fragmented nature of GNU/Linux.Secure boot is a feature in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the replacement for the motherboard firmware or BIOS. It has been implemented by Microsoft in a manner that effectively prevents easy booting of other operating systems on machines which have secure boot enabled. An exchange of cryptographic keys takes place at boot-time so that a system can verify that the...

I’m not saying Linux is the best thing to use for everyone. I am saying, however, that it may be better for you than what you’re using now. Linux is different from Windows or Mac OS X in some fundamental ways. For thousands of people, these differences are a reason to choose Linux over its alternatives. Are they for you? Read on to find out! What is Linux?If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already know, at least a little bit, what Linux is. For the purpose of this article, we’ll view it as an alternative to Windows...

There’s no question that the Raspberry Pi is everyone’s favorite ARM development board right now: it’s cheap, silent, and exceptionally power efficient. The Raspberry Pi makes an excellent choice for low-energy applications like personal servers, routers, firewalls, environmental monitoring setups, etc, etc.But the Raspberry Pi has one big downside, it’s a fairly slow machine. With only 512 MB of RAM (if you have one of the newer builds) and a 700 MHz ARM, it certainly isn’t doing a lot of heavy lifting. Its dedicated GPU makes it possible to do things like playback HD video, but in terms of...

A Nokia job listing [since taken down] has been discovered seeking a Senior Engineer with Linux expertise, rather than Windows Phone experience, this leading the Android masses to have a freak-out-festival about the possibilities of a Google OS Nokia device. At the moment it’s a nearly all-Microsoft party at Nokia with the latter shaking hands heavily with the former for the launch of Windows Phone 8 with devices like the Nokia Lumia 920, a hero for the operating system. With a Linux expert on their team, (not that Nokia doesn’t already have engineers with such expertise), it would appear...