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This is a debate that most certainly brings out the beast in many a Linux user. The argument doesn't generally boil down to which distribution is truly best suited for new users, but which distribution is favored by those in the debate. If we set our personal preferences aside, a clearer picture can arise. But even that clarity can quickly get obscured by the needs and desires of the new users. Given that, I decided to take a different approach to finding the “best distro for new users." My criteria for best distribution must not only be easy to use,...

Sure there are technical forums that discuss btrfs, the shiny new filesystem for Linux but my experience has shown that FReepers meet or exceed the technical expertise anywhere on the net. The two cutting-edge filesystems that are (supposedly) impervious to bitrot are btrfs and zfs (which has a Linux implementation, older than what Oracle has now closed off).

The sheer variety available to the Linux desktop brings with it a level of discussion and debate most other platforms do not know. Which desktop is the best? Should Linux hold onto what has always worked? Should the Linux desktop mimic what others already know? Dare Linux look and feel like OS X?That last idea is a bit of a conundrum – one with multiple arguments. First and foremost, there is no debating that OS X is a fast-growing platform. It not only has deep roots in Linux architecture, it has been accepted by numerous types of users. There...

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Hirschgarten, in the west of Munich, is one of Europe’s biggest beer gardens, with over 8,000 places to sit. It’s a spectacular sight in summer: hundreds of benches as far as the eye can see, trees providing some shelter from the heat, and a vast number of people relaxing and enjoying the city’s famous beers. But while 8,000 is an impressive number, it’s not as impressive as 15,000. That’s how many people the Munich city council has switched from Windows to Linux over the last decade. Migrating workers of Germany’s third-largest city was no easy task and there were plenty...

The Linux platform is actually the base for a multitude of operating systems, but a part of the community feels that there are too many distributions. The truth is that there are probably too few of them. One of the points of contention that usually arise in the Linux community is the fact that there seem to be too many Linux distributions and too many desktop environments. If we were to compare Linux with any other platform that would be true, but such a comparison would be incorrect. Linux is the only platform that allows this kind of freedom, so...

Asking for opinions on the best budget tablet. Something big enough for me to work on -- i.e., be able to type easily and see the display without holding it six inches from my face. Not worried about communications -- as long as it's got WiFi built in (which I'm sure they all do), I can use my cellphone as a mobile hotspot to transfer/send files. This is intended to be a replacement for a working laptop/notebook. And again -- "budget" is the keyword. Thanks all!.

- Ubuntu Kylin China is one of the countries that have suffered the most when Microsoft decided to pull the plug on Windows XP. The Chinese government is now looking towards Linux to fill that gap, and it intends to use its resources to make that happen. China has been struggling for years to make its own Linux operating system, but it had little success. At one point it had something called the Red Flag Linux distribution, but the project never really got off the ground and lost all support from the Chinese government. Microsoft's decision to stop issuing...

A popular beat combo from the town which bought us Nirvana has released a debut album as a Linux kernel module alongside the usual formats. Netcat, which shares its name with a networking tool of the same name, told the world+dog on its Facebook page that the world was ready for Linux kernel module music."Are you ever listening to an album, and thinking 'man, this sounds good, but I wish it crossed from user-space to kernel-space more often!' We got you covered. Our album is now fully playable as a loadable Linux kernel module."The album has the catchy title Cycles...

Red Hat has proven many times that it can acquire and oversee open source projects without tainting them with commercial efforts or otherwise fouling them up. I expect most CentOS users, like the project itself, stand to gain from wearing Red Hat. As for Red Hat, joining with CentOS represents a net win in terms of growing community, ecosystem and paying customers. There was a somewhat quiet, cost-free acquisition of sorts in the Linux world earlier this year when Red Hat announced it was joining forces with Red Hat Enterprise Linux community clone CentOS. The move, which effectively brings organization,...

In this follow up to Replace the Retiring Windows XP with Linux we're going learn the easiest and most foolproof way to install and run Xubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS on your old Windows XP computer. The only requirements are that your old computer has USB ports, and that it supports booting from a USB stick. If your computer is too old for USB, then it's pretty darned old and you really need to think about getting a newer one. There are but four steps: one, go to OSDisc.com and order Xubuntu Linux on a 32-gigabyte USB stick. Then insert the USB stick into your computer,...

Microsoft officially ended support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014. That means the company is no longer patching newly discovered security vulnerabilities in the operating system, and people who continue to use it are opening themselves up to security risks. However, according to NetMarketShare, more than a quarter of all PCs (27.69 percent) were still running Windows XP in March of this year.Why would people continue using a twelve-year-old operating system that would put them at risk?No doubt, many are home users who simply aren't very technology savvy and/or may not have the desire or the money to upgrade...

WASHINGTON – People who have accounts on the enrollment website for President Obama's signature health care law are being told to change their passwords following an administration-wide review of the government's vulnerability to the confounding Heartbleed Internet security flaw. Senior administration officials said there is no indication that the HealthCare.gov site has been compromised and the action is being taken out of an abundance of caution. The government's Heartbleed review is ongoing, the officials said, and users of other websites may also be told to change their passwords in the coming days, including those with accounts on the popular WhiteHouse.gov...

Apple said Thursday that its mobile, desktop and Web services weren’t affected by a major flaw in a set of security software used by hundreds of thousands of websites. The flaw, codenamed “Heartbleed” and first reported by Web security firm Codenomicon, was discovered in a technology called “OpenSSL” — a set of encryption software used by Web companies to safeguard user information. Sites that use OpenSSL will display a small “lock” icon in the top left-hand corner of your Web browser’s address bar (though not all sites showing this lock use OpenSSL); the technology is used on more than two-thirds...

It’s been my experience that, despite any progress, Ubuntu and distros like it have made in gaining new users, those in the tech media continue to get it wrong. In this article, I’ll examine how the tech media continues to spread misinformation about Linux on the desktop, why it happens and what we as users can do about it. Linux is difficult to install Years ago, merely installing and configuring Linux for the desktop could be extremely difficult. And while recent technologies such as UEFI have added some extra hurdles for distribution developers, the end user is able to install...

A serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic library has been discovered that allows attackers to steal information unnoticed. Known as the Heartbleed bug, the vulnerability allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of systems that run vulnerable versions of OpenSSL, revealing the secret authentication and encryption keys to protect the traffic. User names, passwords and the actual content of the communications can also be read. ... OpenSSL recommends that uses immediately upgrade to version 1.0.1g. If that's not possible, users should recompile OpenSSL with the -DOPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS flag to remove the the heartbeat handshake. The 1.0.2 version of...

I got an older Compaq Presario Laptop and I've been toying with the idea of putting Ubuntu on it. I was wondering if I would need to totally wipe the HD to get Ubuntu to run properly or can I install it while leaving Windows 7 on and it will still run OK. I am going to get a new laptop eventually but am in no hurry so it would be nice to still keep windows But I can manage for now without it being I use my Entertainment System Computer most of the time. Thanks in advance for any...

Linux can't be understood in terms of hierarchy. Neither can the Internet. That's because both are examples of heterarchy at work. Flatland, an 1880 novella by Edwin A. Abbott, is about a world with just two dimensions, inhabited by lines and polygons. Trouble starts when a sphere shows up. For business, the same kind of trouble started when Linux and the Internet showed up in the mid-1990s. No matter how useful Linux and the Internet prove to be, business still has trouble getting its head around a virtual world composed of end points that are all autonomous, self-empowered and at...

The big news from Microsoft today was that it has finally launched Office for iPad, which will give users full access to the popular productivity suite if they sign up for the Office 365 subscription service. But under the surface of the announcement, we got our first look at CEO Satya Nadella's broader vision for Microsoft's future. Nadella has only been CEO for 52 days, but we're already getting a sense of how he plans to expand the company's offerings beyond its core products like Windows. In short, Nadella sees Microsoft powering all sorts of devices through services and apps...

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I saw a promo the other day for Google (GOOG) Work. Sadly, I can't locate it or I would have inserted it here so you could see it for yourself. However, it might be fitting that you can't see the promo. Because Google's assault on Microsoft (MSFT) continues to fly under the radar. For whatever reason, it's the most under covered story in tech ... in finance ... and for the sake of extraneous ellipses ... the world. But it's real and it's happening. And Microsoft has no idea what to do in response. How could...