You can tell it’s the holiday season — a lot of people are focusing more on the guy with the red suit who looks quite a bit like Jon ‘maddog’ Hall than they are on digital matters. This also is the time of year, naturally, where pundits make their predictions for the following year.
However, I should admit something here. Truth in advertising: I don’t have a good record in predicting the future. I have a hard enough time predicting what to wear the following day — oh, right: clothes. But Linux and FOSS being, well, Linux and FOSS, these projections are as good as any prediction now being foisted on the FOSS public by the army of digital pundits out there.
So what’s going to happen in 2015?
A lot. Like…
Until Fedora 21, the Fedora Project used to have a process for release names in which knock-down drag-out brawls would break out, rhetorically speaking, in the debate and community-wide voting for the name. Arguably, Fedora 17 “Beefy Miracle” wobbled the process from the rails, and while the rest of the names were noble — my favorite was Fedora 19 “Schrodinger’s Cat” — the formula was fairly simple: Names had to meet a “is-a” test. For example, “Schnozz is a ____, and so is Keister.” Taking the example of naming Fedora 14 “Laughlin,” the Fedora Project took the name of Fedora 13 “Goddard” and, though the miracle of the “is-a” test, had a list of candidates, of which Laughlin won. So the formula is as follows: “Robert H. Goddard was a professor of physics, and so was Robert Laughlin.” To see this in action, you can look at the 
“[A]n open source contributor (and) artist friend” of Joseph’s has already put their artistic talent to work and come up with 
And the beat goes on…
In comes a castoff ThinkPad T500 from a friend in Seattle and I’m now in the 64-bit club.
Let me be clear, for those GNOMEistas who might just have their proverbial knickers in a bunch: GNOME has been a remarkable FOSS citizen providing a better-than-adequate desktop environment for many FOSS users, perhaps even a majority of FOSS users. I just don’t happen to be one of them. Further, I will say this for GNOME: Unity should be more like GNOME. Compliment? You decide.