Bruce Byfield

Is the Linux community under-represented in the Linux Foundation? Last week, this question raised controversies when Free Software Foundation director Matthew Garrett observed that the Linux Foundation had eliminated voting rights for individual members and changed its bylaws to make at-large board members optional. Observing that these changes were made shortly after Karen Sandler of […]

Open source development has consistently proved many ideas that were once considered impossible. For instance, thanks to open source, we now know that people can be motivated by more than money, and that co-operation can be more effective in some aspects of development than competition. Personally, I get a lot of self-satisfied glee each time […]

Addressing questions about the Free Software Foundation (FSF)’s future direction seems long overdue. For that reason, the FSF’s current online survey seems a step in the right direction. In many ways, the survey is a necessity. Although the FSF regularly tackles too many major issues to count, its entire operating budget for 2013 was $1,250,498, […]

I first installed Debian sixteen years ago. Since then, I have tried countless other Linux distributions, and even used one or two regularly for several months, but my main distribution has always been Debian, or at least one of its many derivatives. Familiarity probably explains some of my preference. However, most of my preference comes […]

On the Manjaro mail forum, a thread is rating KDE applications into three categories: second to none, decent, and better uninstalled and replaced. Despite the modern proliferation of desktop environments, such a rating could only be done with GNOME or KDE. No other desktops have encouraged as extensive ecosystems of applications, and, in fact, most […]

2015 was crowded with events for Linux and open source. It was a year in which the runaway success of OpenStack continued, fuelling — among other things, rumors of a Canonical Software public offering. It was also the year of unsuccessful ventures into smartphones by Mozilla, Sailfish, and Ubuntu, and the first appearance of a […]

For years, I’ve wondered why anyone still bothers with proprietary software. Around the turn of the millennium, they might not have found an open source alternative, but today, that situation is rare enough that it comes as a surprise. Force of habit is a likely explanation, but often users simply don’t know what they don’t […]

For years, cloud services have been spreading like an out-of-control bushfire. From mega-corporations to the individual owners of a Chromebook, users are outsourcing their infrastructures, passing their administration and their data to third party applications on the Internet. Software companies are investing heavily in cloud services, and every indication is that they will continue to […]

This is not the time for innovation in desktop environments. The memory of the user revolts against KDE, GNOME, and Unity are still too fresh for developers to attempt major changes. Instead, the preference is for tweaks and minor improvements in functionality that nobody is apt to get too upset about. All the same, I […]

How do you choose a Linux desktop for beginners? The answer is more complicated than usually admitted. Besides ease of use, you should also think about first impressions, the quality of help, stability, and room to grow. These characteristics immediately eliminate distros like Gentoo or Slackware, but still leaves dozens of alternatives, none of which […]