LXer Weekly Roundup for 04-Nov-2012

LXer Feature: 04-Nov-2012 The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

Review: Ubuntu 12.10 Desktop (DistroWatch Weekly #480): After a day and a half of using Ubuntu 12.10 it was an internal struggle not to wipe my hard drive and just find another distribution to review. During the first twenty-four hours Ubuntu spied on me, provided performance which was distinctly sub par, the interface regularly popped up errors (sometimes so frequently the first pop-up wouldn't have faded out of view before the next one appeared), the update notification didn't work and it wasn't possible to turn off accessibility features through the graphical interface. Adding insult to injury, the Unity dash kept locking up or losing focus while I was trying to use it and the operating system crashed more times than not while trying to shutdown or logout.

Precise Puppy - Linux Perfected: There have been a number of releases of Linux distributions in the past couple of weeks but no release gets me more excited than a new version of Puppy Linux.

Windows 8: Does Microsoft’s Split-Personality OS Make Sense?: “The requirements of small-screen mobile devices are incompatible with those of large-screen fixed devices,” Norman says. “Windows 8 has a problem. The real business workhorses of Microsoft Office are not well supported by the mobile apps. So Microsoft had to provide a backwards-compatibility mode, which provides the necessary power, but makes things even more confusing.”

Valve: Linux is Better Than Windows 8 for Gaming: At a presentation at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Denmark earlier this week, Valve Software's Drew Bliss told attendees that the open-sourced operating system Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming at this point.

Food for thought: Consumer collaboration on car design: Each year automobile companies try to predict what new features consumers will want in their cars. If their predictions are right, they are richly rewarded with increased car sales. If they are wrong, they suffer the financial consequences. But wait, is that the best way to design cars? What if car companies invited consumers to the table as equal partners in the design process? The way I see it, consumers could be buying cars they co-designed—reducing the gigantic financial risk to car companies, not to mention the waste of never-purchased vehicles.

Linux FUD in College Education: My fiance started a new class this week - an MIS (Management Information Systems) class. While we were having dinner tonight she brought up the fact there are some - lets say - colorful definitions of Linux in her wonderful "Experiencing MIS" text book.

Windows 8, the post-PC world, and Linux: Microsoft will prevail: First, let's address the idea that the Linux desktop's time is now. It's an easy kill, honestly—despite the ever-improving functionality of distributions such as Ubuntu, they hardly show up as a blip in global operating system market share statistics. Linux accounts for just 1.1 percent of the desktop operating systems in the world, based on statistics from NetMarketshare. By comparison, Windows systems own 91 percent of the market worldwide; OS X has 7 percent. Now, a big chunk of that Windows market share—anywhere from a third to almost half—is Windows XP. And, the reasoning goes, with XP now at the end of its support life, those XP users have to go somewhere. Why not to Linux?

My government is software-stupid: I just checked, and my State government's website here in Australia has 43 pages with the message that Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed if I want to view the page's downloadable PDFs. One variant of the message is This a Portable Document Format (PDF) file and requires the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader. The Reader is easy to download and is free of charge. The link takes you to a download page at adobe.com. Another variant is To view these forms you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader. There are a lot of PDF viewers other than Acrobat Reader, and they're just as free. Safari and Google Chrome browsers even have built-in PDF viewers. So why is my government telling fibs? Does it create its PDFs with Adobe Acrobat software, and does its product licence require it to recommend Acrobat Reader when making those PDFs publicly available? Or is my government just software-stupid?

Apple's poisonous Touch silently kills the GNOMEs of Linux Forest: If a major Linux desktop falls in the forest and no one is around to use it, does it make a sound? That's a question the GNOME project would do well to contemplate. The once mighty Linux desktop has stumbled and looks like it might be poised to come crashing down after the release of GNOME 3. Here's the problem: the radical rewrite that is the GNOME 3 desktop seems to have pleased almost no one.