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As midnight Wednesday becomes Thursday morning, SCALE Team members continue to put in hours, doing everything from wiring the rooms to stuffing swag bags, getting ready for 8 a.m. Thursday morning, when registration opens.

Here’s the rest of the story regarding successors, spins or forks of CrunchBang. The tech media is falling over itself reporting that the “successor” to CrunchBang is something called #!++ which, to many CrunchBang insiders, is nothing more than one — but not “the resurrection” — project based on CrunchBang. It’s a project that appears, in the opinion of many CrunchBang contributors, as one that is trying to capitalize on the name, now that it’s “available,” in a manner of speaking.

“You’ve done enough Ken. Maybe it’s time to let someone else have a go at this. What’s the point of struggling through your recovery while manning Reglue. It’s not like you have any obligation to anyone to do this further. No one would blame you for taking your retirement and enjoying it.”

There are about 130 sessions at SCALE 13x and a great majority of them are of interest to the beginner and/or intermediate user. A rule of thumb in attending a session is that if you’ve never heard of the software and/or you’d never have a reason to use it, you’re probably not a sysadmin and don’t need to attend. That’s of little consolation to most, because of the packed schedule.

The sale of the first ever Ubuntu phone through a European flash sale was evidently a success. Of course, we wouldn’t know as the phone isn’t available yet to those of us who live on this side of the pond, so it hasn’t been getting much press over here. However, EU sites are all atwitter with headlines like “Ubuntu Sells Out!”

Who would’ve thought it possible that digital rights management (DRM) would come to the coffee business? Well, it has. Believe it or not, Keurig now includes DRM on their coffee makers. Why? To keep users from using anything but Keurig coffee pods on their machines, of course. You know, just like the DRM used by some printer manufacturers to keep you coming back (and coming back) for their branded replacement ink cartridges instead of opting for the much cheaper store brand.

I can say that, knock on wood, we have already had what I hope is going to be the only “black-cat-walking-under-the-ladder” glitch-of-the-show moment a couple of weeks ago when the idiot serving as the publicity chair — okay, that would be me — pulled the wrong list of speakers (the ones not chosen) to start doing speaker interviews with the Publicity Team. Thankfully, I found the error before any interviews were done, but it was a considerable amount of orchestrated work that was thrown out the window and redone with the right list.

We’ve had some fairly high profile Linux distros fold up their tents and move along. Whether due to a lack of financial support or the project growing larger than a one man dev team can manage, distros do go away. It’s never for a good reason but the fact remains: When a distro ceases to exist, a lot of people get left in the lurch.

The recent purchase of a Chromebook for my son got me thinking about a new opportunity for Linux on the desktop. This is not an idea for getting a standard GNU/Linux desktop to automagically replace all existing Windows desktops, but to leverage the cloud computing paradigm with a bulked­-up Chromebook-­like system that would be workable for 80 to 90 percent of personal, school, and business needs.

Other categories provided interesting results and are worth a mention. Server Distribution of the Year was a close one in 2015 polling, with CentOS squeaking by Slackware to win the category. Debian finished third here. Database of the Year had MariaDB out ahead, followed by PostgreSQL and MySQL.

CrunchBang lead developer Philip Newborough released this statement on the CrunchBang forums today: “I have decided to stop developing CrunchBang. This has not been an easy decision to make and I’ve been putting it off for months. It’s hard to let go of something you love."

This isn’t a FOSS story exactly, but I’m sure there’s hardly a FOSSer of a certain age who didn’t spend too many hours at a Radio Shack, back when the stores were for electronic hobbyists. Indeed, many of us saw our first consumer computers at Radio Shack, with programs loaded and data saved to a manual cassette recorder. Yup, those were the days.

The first hurdle to his proposal comes on February 26, the date on which the FCC is expected to vote on the new rules. This is probably already a done deal, as it’s unlikely that Wheeler would’ve penned yesterday’s piece for Wired if he wasn’t confident that he already has the support of his fellow commissioners. So, the question is, what happens next?

As we get closer to the Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 13x for those of you keeping score at home — it bears mentioning that the largest community-run Linux/FOSS show in North America has grown to host a lot of other sub-events during the course of the four-day expo.

Fact is, I had a choice in this matter. My choice was to go all Angelina Jolie on this friggin’ monster and be done with it. I may again have cancer but I made sure it wasn’t going to be in my throat.

Some people don’t like any changes made to Linux user space which makes the operating system easier to use or configure for casual users. They would rather the user be befuddled and helpless, because according to them, people who don’t know how to open a terminal and edit a configuration file in Emacs have no business sitting at a computer keyboard for any purpose.

Ruth Suehle and a speaker to be named later (more than likely in the next 24 hours) will keynote at SCALE 13x. There are about 130 sessions in the four days, and just over 100 exhibitors.

But folks, if it doesn’t work out of the box, to a new user it just doesn’t work and Linux sucks. No one should have to tinker to get a default application to work. That’s the job of a developer, not the end user.

Ah, there’s the rub. For this to work, the new Windows must work “as expected.” What if it doesn’t? What if Redmond lays an egg and the new operating system is reminiscent of Windows ME or Vista? Will users be given the ability to roll back to their old OS as they could during the Vista brouhaha? And imagine the public relations nightmare if 10 turns out to be an utter fail. It could happen. This is Microsoft, after all.

Until now, we thought the days of the Top Ten on FOSS Force were long gone. However, the systemd brouhaha has awakened the inner Top Ten List that has been sleeping within us for all these years. Today, for one day only, the Top Ten List returns for one last encore — or the last one until the next time something tickles us funny.

Ladies and gentlemen, from the home office in Omaha, Nebraska, here is this week’s Top Ten List — the top ten things Linux users say about systemd.