November 4, 2025
Keeping tech free
It’s time for our annual “What’s Your Distro” poll, to determine who gets the FOSS Force Best Distro Award for 2015. This year we’re pulling out all the stops. We want this one to be a metaphoric old fashioned slug fest that will be played until only one distro is standing.
The results of our hardware platform poll have been tallied and just as we suspected, FOSS Force readers in large part use every platform available. The poll, which asked what different hardware platforms you use, offered a slate of answers too long to list here. Let’s just say it covered the gamut, from smartphones to desktops, and included separate places to tic for different operating systems.
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of December, 2015.
1. Is That Linux? No, It’s PC-BSD by Larry Cafiero. Published December 3, 2015. An encounter at a local coffee house causes a fellow customer to ask, “Is that Linux on your machine?” Nope, it wasn’t, but you know what it was. The title gives it away.
2. Linux Foundation’s Deal With the Devil by Christine Hall. Published December 14, 2015. The Linux Foundation made a deal to help Microsoft offer Linux certifications? Say it ain’t so, Joe.
3. Ubuntu Bugs That Won’t Go Away by Ken Starks. Published December 15, 2015. It’s one think when a bug needs fixing in an operating system. When the bug remains unfixed since 2012, that a whole ‘nother story.
Last updated 12/30/15 at 8:06 p.m. EST
FOSS Force has learned that the founder of Debian and current Docker employee Ian Murdock is dead at age 42.
The news of Murdock’s death was first made public in a blog post on the Docker website, where he worked. When the page became unreachable at approximately 4:20 p.m. EST, there was a glimmer of hope that perhaps the report had been an error, as the post made no mention of a cause of death, nor did it reference disturbing tweets on Murdock’s Twitter account on Monday. However, the page was back online by a little after 5:00 p.m.
Right about now is the time we told you we’d be giving you the results of the poll we started last week detailing the methods our readers use to receive and send emails. Well, it ain’t going to happen. Nor are we going to tell you next Wednesday about the results of the poll we put up late Sunday night on how you feel about Microsoft as an open source company. Why? The best we can come up with is “the dog ate our homework.” Actually, none of us has a dog, so that’s out. We’ll just say the poll data ran away from home.
Business, News, Security and Social Networks
Reuters and many tech websites are reporting this morning that Twitter has been warning some of its users of a possible hack. This is unprecedented for the social media site, which has never issued such an alert before.
How do you receive and send your email? Inquiring minds want to know.
Last week’s article about Mozilla thinking of kicking Thunderbird out of the house to stay with friends started us thinking. For some reason, probably because our thoughts were on other things, such as the difference between the java in our cup (Chock full o’ Nuts, which has no nuts, by the way) and the Java on our machines (which has no Chock full o’ Nuts — go figure), it never occurred to us that the mobile revolution might’ve changed the way folks use email more than we’d realized.
The results of our latest poll have been tallied and FOSS Force readers evidently think that Mozilla should keep Thunderbird instead of helping the project find a new home. Mozilla executive chairperson, Mitchell Baker, announced on November 30 that the foundation intended to eventually separate itself from the popular desktop email client it first released in 2004.
Mozilla has announced that it’s dropping a program everyone but Mozilla seemed to realize was a bad idea from the start. In a blog posting on Friday, the organization’s vice president of content services, Darren Herman, wrote that Mozilla has “made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery.” The much disliked sponsored tiles won’t immediately disappear from users’ browsers, however. “Naturally, we will fulfill our current commitments as we wind down this experiment over the next few months.”
