It's Been A Great Month So Far For Open-Source/Linux Users

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 24 July 2015 at 06:42 PM EDT. 5 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
It's been a very exciting month so far for Linux and open-source enthusiasts, but I'm hearing that at least one really exciting announcement may still make it out in the next week.

Besides the open-source Mesa finally hitting OpenGL 4.0+, Vulkan being right on the horizon, there being Skylake just around the corner, AMD R9 Fury Linux benchmarks coming next week, and Intel Skylake being days away, there's been many other exciting announcements so far this month and milestones for free software.

Here's a look at the most popular news so far this July of the 213 articles already written this month:

The NSA Is Looking At Systemd's KDBUS
The latest "news tip" is from a Phoronix reader who expressed "concerns" that at least one NSA security analyst is going through the code for KDBUS, the systemd-backed in-kernel IPC mechanism that's planning for integration in Linux 4.3.

Ubuntu Is Finally Fixing Its Annoying GRUB Setting
An annoying setting of Ubuntu's GRUB configuration is going to be finally addressed in Ubuntu 15.10 and will be addressed in current Ubuntu releases via a stable release update.

EXT3 File-System Driver To Be Removed From The Linux Kernel
With the EXT4 file-system having been stable for years as an evolutionary upgrade to EXT3, the EXT4 module supporting mounting EXT3 file-systems, and most (all?) Linux distributions having switched to EXT4 by default, there's now patches for removing the EXT3 file-system driver from the Linux kernel.

Shashlik: A New Way To Run Android Apps On Linux
Shashlik is an "Android Simulated Environment" to serve as a launcher for running Android applications on a conventional GNU/Linux distribution.

It's Been Five Months Since I Left Ubuntu For Fedora On My Main Workstation
It's been five months since I quit using Ubuntu Linux on my main production system and switched over to Fedora Workstation. Looking back, it was a fantastic decision.

Firefox 39.0 Brings New Features, HTML5 Changes
Firefox 39.0 is available this morning before the 4th of July weekend holiday in the US.

Mozilla Planning Invasive Changes To The Fundamentals Of Firefox
Firefox developers are revisiting at how they build their web browser and how they can better utilize modern web technologies and in the process move away from XUL/XBL within their Gecko Engine.

Btrfs Seems To Finally Have Failed Me On A Production System
In the Phoronix server room for our Linux hardware testing and the LinuxBenchmarking.com daily performance tracker there are 16 of the 56 systems running Btrfs as their root file-system. While those systems have been chugging along for months and many of them running the latest daily Git kernel, I've finally had one of the systems run into some apparent Btrfs file-system issues.

Ubuntu Making Progress On Snappy Personal Desktop
For those interested, it's becoming possible to play with Ubuntu's Snappy next-generation package manager from a personal desktop.

Confirmed: America's Army Is Coming Back To Linux
As a quick follow-up to America's Army looking at SteamOS/Linux support from earlier this week, it turns out the developers are indeed exploring a Linux client and server.

Red Hat Makes Progress On Firefox Native For Wayland
Besides LibreOffice running natively on Wayland, progress has been made this week on running Mozilla's Firefox web-browser natively on Wayland.

Intel's Broadwell i7-5775C Runs Much Happier On Fedora 22 Than Ubuntu Linux
While there's been some stability issues / kernel panics with the high-end Core i7 5775C "Broadwell" processor on Linux, I've found out that Fedora 22 yields a much better experience than Ubuntu 15.04/15.10.

Stay tuned for more exciting Linux/open-source news to come, and hopefully this particularly landmark announcement will also be part of it this month.

If you appreciate all of our open-source/Linux coverage at Phoronix primarily aimed at gamers, enthusiasts, and other professionals, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium and/or making a PayPal tip or even donating Bitcoin. With most of the articles coming from myself and our wonderful summer intern, Eric Griffith, there's a lot of work involved plus crazy electrical costs, hardware costs, and more.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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