In the past month, there have been
quite a few interesting developments in the Linux world. First and
foremost, the
latest version of Ubuntu was released on April 26th. Ubuntu 12.04
as an LTS (long term support) release, and this particular version
will be supported for five years. It again features the Unity desktop
environment, and the infamous dock remains on the left hand side of
the monitor. Aesthetics aside, however, this is a different Linux
distribution. First and foremost are the new privacy settings. Users
can easily choose not only how the system monitors their behavior,
but also whether or not different types of applications are even
allowed to do so. If an end user wishes that no websites are recorded
on the system, they simply need to check a box, and it's done. If a
user wants to prevent, say, Google Chrome from monitoring their
behavior, but wants Mozilla Firefox to be able to do so, that's also
an option.
There is some speculation that the
increase in support from three to five years was an attempt by
Canonical to encourage more businesses to adopt Ubuntu, which then
led to the inveitable comparison with Red Hat. Mark
Shuttleworth denies that Ubuntu will split into two separate
versions, similar to Red Hat having its RHEL (Enterprise Linux)
for business users, and Fedora for the home user. While I personally
believe that this is Canonical's plan at the moment, it is possible
that the market may demand a split.
On a different note, Valve
software is officially releasing its Steam distribution client for
Linux. One of the main arguments against mainstream adoption of
Linux by average users has been that the operating system doesn't
support many video games. Having Steam's vast library of games
available may do a great deal to change that perception. On a
personal note, I find the timing of this announcement interesting.
With Windows 8 having recently released its Consumer Preview,
combined with the fact that Microsoft
is pushing the concept of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface,
which could prevent Linux installation on new computers, perhaps
Valve believes it's likely that Linux will be expanding to more
computers in the near future. It's more likely that Steam just saw an
easy way to expand their market. Steam is already available for Mac
OS/X, and, while BSD and Linux are not the same OS, they are both
POSIX-compliant, Unix-like OS, so it was more likely that Valve was
able to make some minor changes to their system to get it to run on
Linux.
On the desktop environment front, MATE
version 1.2 was recently released. MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2
desktop environment, which was established when GNOME 3 was released.
It is a very “traditional” feeling desktop environment (meaning
it's reminiscent of Windows 98), and happens to be the default
environment on Linux Mint. According to the charts ad
distrowatch.com, Mint is still reigning as the most popular Linux
distribution over the previous 30 days, although a
check of the statistics from the last week shows Mint holding a
razor-thin lead over Ubuntu.
Looking into the technical side of
things, Adobe
has declared that Flash Player version 11.2 will be the last Flash
Player it releases for Linux. From this point forward, the only
support Adobe will be providing for Flash in Linux will come through
Google Chrome. Adobe will continue to provide security updates and
bug fixes for older versions of Flash Player.
In other,
non-Linux news, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
have a nice article
on the history and future of Haiku. While the article itself
includes some interesting technical information, it is also a nice
look at the motivation behind creating yet another operating system.
I don't see myself switching to Haiku as my primary OS any time soon,
but I do think it's always nice to have multiple options available.
Also, MINIX is still alive and kicking,
and it released a
new stable version on Leap Day. Historically speaking, MINIX is
the OS upon which Linus Torvalds based some of the initial Linux
code. In his initial message which announced Linux, Torvalds famously
asked his bulletin board for “feedback
on things people like/dislike in minix”. On a personal note,
the history of Linux via bulletin board posts is incredibly amusing.
No one could have imagined what Linux was going to become.
Finally, in news that spans multiple
Operating Systems, version
1 of the Go programming language has been released. Go was
developed by Google, and supports Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS/X, and
Windows. Its future appears to be primarily in creating Google
applications, and the language seems designed to be lightweight and
quickly compiling. It is informative that it's stated to work with
some versions of BSD (FreeBSD and OS/X), and not others. This shows
one of the primary differences in BSD and Linux. A program that works
with one Linux distribution will work with all distributions-- at
least, as long as the two distros use compatible versions of the
kernel. BSD has been forked heavily enough that separate versions may
or may not be able to run the same programs.
