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Linux has now also captured the largest share of consumer computing, if that category is defined to include, as it should, mobile devices and tablets as well as personal computers. According to a Goldman Sachs (GS) report issued last December, Google's (GOOG) Android -- which is Linux-based -- enjoys a 42% share of all newly sold consumer computing products, compared with 24% for Apple (AAPL) and 20% for Microsoft (MSFT).

The open source configuration management framework has moved from Ruby to Erlang for its core API server to enable better scaling and performance

Linux developer Matthew Garrett, who does a lot of research into UEFI topics, writes in a blog post that by storing a large amount of data in UEFI variables, he managed to disrupt a Samsung notebook running Windows to such a degree that it subsequently refused to start. In his post, the developer also points to some sample code of the Windows program that he executed at administrator level to disable the notebook. The developer had previously speculated that some Samsung notebooks with UEFI firmware may be rendered inoperative under Windows in the same way that they were when starting Linux under certain circumstances. The experiment to confirm this was successful.

If Linux Girl didn't have to spend such a large proportion of her salary dry-cleaning her cape each week, there's no doubt she would invest those extra fortunes in some of the many purveyors of ibuprofen and other pain-relieving medicines. Why? Because of all the headaches FOSS fans are forced to endure here in the Linux blogosphere.

The kernel developers are planning a kernel-based implementation of the D-Bus protocol, which will offer faster communication between system processes and between applications

What excites me about ZWheelz is the potential to improve our education system, environment, energy independence, and economy—all with what I like to call, one "EZ" project. It all began when I built a plane from a kit, then saw the documentary, Who Killed The Electric Car?, and decided to build an electric car. Turns out, it functioned really well, and I began wondering: "Why aren't there more electric vehicles on the road?"

The mobile revolution has changed user expectations of how they interact with different products. Meeting these changed expectations requires a huge amount of re-thinking from user experience (UX) designers. Pascal Mangold, CEO of Magnolia, recently explored this trend in an article on how the mobile revolution is challenging open source product interfaces and explained how Magnolia CMS, an open-source enterprise-grade Java Content Management System, redesigned its web-based interface to give its users an innovative new "driven by touch" content management experience.

Debian developers are still working on making the operating system compiler agnostic so that its packages can be built with LLVM/Clang and other compilers rather than continuing in a monogamist relationship with GCC...

UK to launch first-ever satellite controlled by a mobile phone… and the scientists have chosen a Google Nexus handset.

GNOME developer Travis Reitter is reporting on the decision by the GNOME developers to make JavaScript the standard language for GNOME application development

Well it's been another wild week here in the Linux blogosphere, what with all the ruckus emanating out of the bordering Redmond territories. Much like what happened last fall when Windows 8 made its fanfare-filled debut, the launch of Office 2013 and 365 last Tuesday left more than a few Linux bloggers with a ringing in the ears that didn't abate for days.

LibreOffice 4.0, which is due to arrive soon, is to come with an app that allows the office suite's presentation features to be controlled from Android smartphones

Munich's multiyear migration to Linux has been nothing if not an ongoing saga over the past decade or so, beset as it has been by stops, starts, and various twists and turns. The story appeared to have a happy ending in November when Munich reported that using Linux had already saved it more than 10 million euros, but last week Microsoft spoke up with a different tale.

Lennart Poettering, the controversial open-source developer behind PulseAudio and systemd among other projects, has written a lengthy blog post as he attempts to battle some myths about his Linux init daemon...

Surviving tech's bubble, but not Microsoft Before Apple and Google turned computing into a webified, personalised and mobile experience, there was Microsoft. It was Microsoft that set the computing paradigm with a layer of software called Windows, which made computing personal, powerful and affordable when married with Intel chips. But before all of them, there was Lotus Development Corp, with its Lotus 1-2-3 software - so-called because it integrated three elements: spreadsheet, database and graphics. In many ways, the 30-year-old software package laid the foundations for the type of productivity app that's so ubiquitous in the modern computing experience and yet so important it has been thrown into the cloud by Google with Docs, Apple with iWorks and Microsoft with Office 365.…

While still a ways from being comparable to the proprietary graphics drivers in terms of features and OpenGL performance, the open-source GPU drivers found by default in the forthcoming Ubuntu 13.04 release are a big improvement over the out-of-the-box graphics drivers found in earlier Ubuntu Linux releases. The Ubuntu desktop is also faster thanks to improvements to its Unity desktop environment and Compiz compositing window manager. In this article are Linux gaming benchmarks looking at the performance of Fedora 17, Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.10, and a preliminary Ubuntu 13.04 development snapshot. In this first article, the OpenGL performance of Intel and Radeon graphics are being benchmarked.

In the world of Open Source, they do things differently. Even resignations. Alan Cox, effectively number two in the Linux world after Linus Torvalds, resigned on Wednesday. Cox, who’s paid by Intel for his Linux work and officially lists himself as “Works at Etched Pixels Digital Design” on his Google+ profile, announced his resignation in a public statement that is as transparent as it is honest.

Fedora 18 was officially released this week for x86/x86_64, but the ARM version of Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow" is still under development. Fedora 18 for ARM went into beta last week and since then benchmarks were carried out comparing Spherical Cow on ARM to other popular ARM Linux distributions.

Intel's Mesa DRI driver received a new patch this weekend that's capable of enhancing the open-source graphics driver's performance for some OpenGL games...

A Phoronix reader has announced his work on SDDM within the Phoronix Forums this weekend. SDDM is a very lightweight display management that takes advantage of Qt's QML...