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Posts published by “FOSS Force”

Mandriva 1998-2015

By FOSS Force on May 29, 2015 |

Distros, News and Operating Systems

MandrakeMandriva S.A., the French company behind Mandriva, the distribution that long time Linux users will remember as Mandrake, died this week at the age of sixteen. The announcement came in the form of a notice posted by the company earlier this week. The cause of death was financial hemorrhaging.

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The distro began life as Mandrake, but was forced to change its name due to a trademark dispute with the Hearst newspaper chain, which owned the rights to the “Mandrake the Magician” comic strip. Mandriva was a combination of the original name and Conectiva, a Brazilian distro the company purchased for $2.3 million in 2005.

Continue readingMandriva 1998-2015

Our Fundraiser Extended, New Perk & Some Deals

By FOSS Force on May 23, 2015 |

Site News

Well, maybe we can’t call it our May Pledge Drive any more. We’ve extended our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign, which was scheduled to end a week from tomorrow. The campaign will now remain active until Monday, June 15. We’re doing this, of course, in order to have a better shot at reaching our $6,000 goal. So far we’ve raised $1,030. With the extension, we can do this, but much work needs to be done.

This is important. This money will be necessary if we are to live up to our name and become a legitimate force in the FOSS world (sorry, we couldn’t resist). For those of you who don’t already know about our campaign, all of the money will be used to pay the writers and journalists who get down in the trenches and get the story told — the stories that are important to the FOSS community.

** If our coverage matters to you, please consider supporting our work through our FOSS Force Independence 2026 fundraiser. **

If you’ve already contributed to our campaign, we thank you. If not, please know that we are depending on those who value our site to make a contribution, so we can offer you even more than we do now. As our writer Larry Cafiero said in a Facebook post a few weeks back: the time has come for us to ramp up our coverage.

If you visit our IndieGoGo fundraising page, you’ll see that we’re offering some pretty cool perks — so you can get something beyond the mere satisfaction of being a big help if you want. In fact, we just added a really nice perk today, and lowered the asking price on some others.

Continue readingOur Fundraiser Extended, New Perk & Some Deals
KDE Tops PollKDE

KDE Tops Poll

By FOSS Force on March 27, 2015 |

Community, Desktops and Polls

It didn’t take nearly as long to count the votes for our desktop poll as it did for last week’s distro poll, mainly due to the fact that not as many of you voted, but also because there aren’t nearly as many desktop environments and window managers as their are Linux distros. Also, unlike the distro poll, there was a clear cut winner instead of a virtual tie.

KDEActually, of course, it’s not about winners and losers. It’s about what you like. It’s about preferences. After all, unless you’re a diehard command line person, the desktop is how you interact with your computer.

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Again this year, KDE tops the list with a commanding lead, piling up over a quarter of the 617 votes cast. This is a huge drop from the 70 percent showing it made the last time we conducted a desktop poll, back in January and February of last year. In that poll, however, users were only given three desktop choices — KDE, GNOME 3 and Cinnamon. This year, voters were served up a menu that included eight popular desktops from which to choose. As in last year’s poll, voters could also opt to place write-in votes.

Why KDE? According to your comments, there were two major reasons: stability and configurability, with many of you saying, “It just works.” But there seemed to be some disagreement over whether KDE’s legendary configurability is as great as it once was.

Continue readingKDE Tops Poll

Poll Results: Ubuntu & Mint End in Near Tie

By FOSS Force on March 21, 2015 |

Distros, Operating Systems and Polls

The FOSS Force Linux Distro poll is now one for the record books. The poll, which ran for a week, finishing just before midnight on Wednesday, asked the simple question, “What Linux distro do you use most?”

** If our coverage matters to you, please consider supporting our work through our FOSS Force Independence 2026 fundraiser. **

We figured this would be a popular poll going in. What we didn’t know was exactly how popular. By the time the dust had settled, over twenty-five hundred of you had voted — more than double the previous FOSS Force poll record, set back in 2013 for the third and final round of our Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog poll. Back then, a little over a thousand of you voted, leading us to think we’d crossed the Rainbow Bridge into Valhalla.

Continue readingPoll Results: Ubuntu & Mint End in Near Tie