One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to only use cloud services when absolutely necessary. Web apps are great tools when you need to collaborate at a distance, but other than that you’re better off keeping your work on your own machines, for privacy reasons if nothing else.
FOSS Force
The Raspberry Pi Report
With the holidays and all, the month of December wasn’t as action packed as some of the past months have been concerning the Raspberry Pi, but there were still some interesting stories that occurred. Let’s take a minute to reflect back on the Raspberry Pi and December.
Pi Wars: The second annual Pi Wars competition occurred in Cambridge this past December, and just like the year before it was a complete success.
The Heart of Linux
I’ve never been a big believer in luck. Some of us believe that in some cases some sort of predetermination takes place: one thing happening to allow another thing to happen that in turn produces something significant in one or more lives. Not all the time, but often enough to make it something to ponder when we’re in a position to ponder such things. But I don’t make predictions, whether for a new year or a new place or a new time. I simply no longer predict anything. I’ve been wrong too many times.
We’re going to pretend like we’re AM disc jockeys from the golden days of top 40 radio and countdown the top nine stories that appeared on FOSS Force last year. Along the way, we’ll offer a bit of commentary, and maybe remind you a time or two that things were much different way back in 2015.
The FOSS Force Poll
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.
FOSS Week in Review
Now that we’ve put 2015 to bed — and not a moment too soon — we’ll take one more look at the week that was and send everyone off rolling into 2016.
Linux Mint Readies for the New Year: Clem Lefebvre didn’t waste any time outlining what he, and Linux Mint, have planned for 2016 in his latest blog post.
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.
If you’ve been visiting FOSS Force for a while, you might have noticed some changes around here. Nothing serious. We didn’t do anything drastic like change our layout or put our content up in twenty page slide shows or anything like that. But we’ve expanded, and I think, improved our content. We’re offering more coverage of FOSS than ever before, while also expanding into territories of free tech that lie outside the arena of software and Linux.
You might have also noticed that the expansion began just after our May fundraising campaign in which you gave us $2,300 to improve our site. Thanks to you, we have been able to pay our writers — not much mind you, truthfully a small fraction of what they should be paid — which has been a key element to our improved coverage.
Larry the BSD Guy
This is the time of year when we look back and go, “Wow. How did this all ever happen?” Or something to that effect. And after about a month of PC-BSD daily use, the verdict so far (subject to appeal) is overwhelmingly positive with a couple of bumps (e.g., someday I will turn off tap-to-click on my touchpad).