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Lower Saxony says 'auf wiedersehen, pinguin' The German state of Lower Saxony plans to follow Munich's example, and migrate a reported 13,000 users from Linux back to Windows. Apparently undaunted by the cost of the Munich switch (which we reported in January could be as much as €100m), Lower Saxony is considering making the change in its tax office. The state seems to expect a much cheaper transition, with Heise (in German here) reporting the first-year budget is €5.9m, and another €7m further out.The tax office argues its decision is driven by compatibility: field workers and teleworkers overwhelmingly use Windows,...

For many early Linux users, Slackware was their introduction. One user told me her first Linux install was Slackware—and she had to use a hex editor to fix the partition tables so that Slackware would install. Support for her hardware was added in a later release. Another got his start building the data center that would power one of the first internet-enabled real estate sites. In the mid-1990s, Slackware was one of the easiest distributions to get and didn't require a lot of effort to get IP masquerading to work correctly. A third person mentioned going to sleep while...

First, I want to be absolutely clear about something. I have been a full time Linux on the desktop user for well over a decade. It has been and will always be my preferred platform for desktop and server usage. It does just what I need and I appreciate that. All of that said however, the "masses" haven't gravitated towards Linux for their desktop usage like I had hoped. In this article, I'm going to explore the reasons why I think this has happened.Inside the Failure of Desktop Linux 1) Linux isn't pre-installed - No matter how much we may...

A while ago, we have covered about OSBoxes, a website that offers a collection of free, ready-to-use Linux and Unix VMs. You can download and try them on your Linux system using VirtualBox or VMWare workstation. Today, I stumbled upon a similar service named “DistroTest”. Unlike OSBoxes, DistroTest allows you to try the live Linux and Unix operating systems for free. You can test 100+ Linux and Unix operating systems online without having to install them locally. Just visit the website, choose the Linux/Unix distro of your choice and fire it up! Two good Samaritans named Andy Klemann and...

Linux Mint is one of the best Linux distributions for new users. It runs pretty well out of the box. Still, there are a few recommended things to do after installing Linux Mint for the first time. In this article, I am going to share some basic yet effective tips that will make your Linux Mint experience even better. If you follow these best practices, you’ll have a more user-friendly system.Things to do after installing Linux Mint 19 Tara I am using Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon edition while writing this article so some of the points in this list are specific...

For several reasons (including curiosity), a few weeks ago I started using Xfce as my Linux desktop. One reason was trouble with background daemons eating up all the CPU and I/O bandwidth on my very powerful main workstation. Of course, some of the instability may be due to my removal of some of the RPM packages that provide those background daemons. However, even before I removed the RPMs, the fact is KDE was unstable and causing performance and stability issues. I needed to use a different desktop to avoid these problems. I realized in looking back over my series of...

IntroductionUbuntu and Fedora are both among the top desktop Linux distributions, but they are very different. Fedora is Redhat's testing ground, and it's geared more towards developers and system administrators. On the other hand, Ubuntu is Canonical's primary product, and it tries to please everyone. LineageBoth Ubuntu and Fedora descend from titans in the Linux world. Ubuntu is the child of Debian, and Fedora is a clone of Redhat Linux, which evolved into Redhat Enterprise Linux(RHEL). Both distributions still carry many of the hallmarks of their family trees. They both have their respective families' package managers, package formats, repository formats,...

So happy for you, Microsoft, \r\n Windows Notepad users, rejoice! Microsoft's text editing app, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, has finally been taught how to handle line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices."This has been a major annoyance for developers, IT Pros, administrators, and end users throughout the community," Microsoft acknowledged in a blog post today, without touching on why the issue was allowed to fester for more than three decades.Notepad's line feed limitations may not inspire the same level of partisan bickering as the tabs vs....

Microsoft on Monday announced Azure Sphere, a new technology to protect the processors that power smart appliances, connected toys, and other gadgets. Azure Sphere is powered in large part by Linux, a free operating system that Microsoft once viewed as a major threat. It's the first time ever that Microsoft has made Linux part of a product offering. Microsoft announced on Monday a new technology called Azure Sphere, a new system for securing the tiny processors that power smart appliances, connected toys, and other gadgets. We'll get to the specifics in a moment, but here's the really notable part:...

For the past few years, Linux Mint has been unstoppable in terms of attracting new users. I honestly never really understood its appeal over Ubuntu MATE. However, the fact remains that the Cinnamon desktop seems to be a large part of its appeal. Recently I had the pleasure of discovering another desktop distro that is aimed at newer uses. It's lightning fast, and offers fantastic support for features that newer Linux users are usually looking for. This distro is called MX Linux and it's latest release is called MX 17.In this article, we're going to compare both Linux Mint and...

I’ve been running Linux on the desktop for decades. When I was starting with it, Linux was, comparatively, harder to use than the GUI-based operating systems then available from Apple and Microsoft. That was then. This is now.Today, Linux, especially such distributions as openSUSE, Ubuntu and, my favorite, Linux Mint, are just as easy to use as macOS and Windows. And they don’t have the security bugs. What’s that? You don’t mind dealing with a few bugs? Well, on the latest Patch Tuesday, as Woody Leonhard put it, an “enormous number of patches spewed out of Microsoft this month, with...

More than 100,000 developers participated in this year's Annual Developer Survey, which included several new topics ranging from ethics in coding to artificial intelligence (AI). The results are finally here and reveal the fact that some technologies and operating systems have become more popular than others in the past year.According to the survey, JavaScript remains the most used programming language for the six years in a row, back-end developer is the most common developer type, over 80 percent of responders code as a hobby and 92.9 percent are male, and Node.js is the number one framework used by developers.Moreover, MySQL...

A survey of computer security experts confirms that they generally consider Linux superior to either the Windows or Apple operating systems when it comes to security....And if you want to try out Linux, all you really need is a spare laptop or desktop, one or two years old, that you aren’t using any more, and to then follow the instructions provided here on Behind the Black by reader James Stephens for Getting and Installing Linux."

Do you want to learn about Linux? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Not sure what Linux is? To a purist, Linux refers to an open source kernel – the program at the heart of the operating system. But it’s easiest to think of Linux as a family of free and open source software operating systems built around that kernel. More importantly, it’s a genuine contender to the Windows family of operating systems, surpassing it in many areas.Linux differs in so many ways to Windows. You might be well versed with Windows. But if you’re keen to explore and...

Is Intel really planning on making this shit architectural? Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane? They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense. That makes all your [i.e. Woodhouse’s] arguments questionable and suspicious. The patches do things that are not sane. …So somebody isn’t telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out. ...Intel, for its part, offered the following statement: “We take the feedback of industry partners seriously. We are actively engaging with the Linux community, including Linus,...

Microsoft has given the world new versions of PowerShell that bring the popular automation and scripting tool to MacOS and Linux.PowerShell Core 6.0’s both an upgrade and a replacement for its predecessors.It’s a replacement because Microsoft is no longer actively developing its predecessor, “Windows PowerShell”. That tool will be kept secure in future updates to Windows Server and Windows.Those of you looking for future fun, by way of enhancements, need to adopt PowerShell Core. That moniker reflects the fact it runs with the .Net Core, rather than the Windows-only .NET framework.The change has been made because Microsoft wants sysadmins to...

All 500 machines on the TOP500 supercomputer list run Linux. Here’s how the little OS that could, did.After years of pushing toward total domination, Linux finally did it. It is running on all 500 of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world, and who knows how many more after that. That’s even more impressive than Intel’s domination of the list, with 92 percent of the processors in the top 500. So, how did Linux get here? How did this upstart operating system created by a college student from Finland 26 years ago steamroll Unix, a creation of Bell Labs and supported...

I saw elsewhere on the net, that Linux Journal is ceasing publication. From their homepage: Linux Journal Ceases Publication EOF It looks like we’re at the end, folks. If all goes according to a plan we’d rather not have, the November issue of Linux Journal was our last.

Never go full Windows Munich city council's administrative and personnel committee has decided to move any remaining Linux systems to Windows 10 in 2020.A coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives on the committee voted (PDF, in Deutsche, natürlich) for the Windows migration on Wednesday, Social Democrat councillor Anne Hübner told The Register.Munich rose to fame in the open-source world for deciding to use Linux and LibreOffice to make the city independent from the claws of Microsoft. But the plan was never fully realised – mail servers, for instance, eventually wound up migrating to Microsoft Exchange – and in February the...

"KDE Edition In continuation with what’s been done in the past, Linux Mint 18.3 will feature a KDE edition, but it will be the last release to do so."