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After sharing the most popular Linux stories of 2011 in terms of Phoronix news articles, here is a listing of the most popular featured Phoronix articles from this past calendar year...

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Embedded mode for TabBox in KWin Reimplemented name filtering in Dolphin Initial support for resource events in read-only kparts in kdelibs read more

As the year comes to a close, it is time for year-end reflections. In our case that means sharing the most popular articles of 2011. The following were viewed the most, and in some case created a lot of discussion as well.

Announcing BoF open registration for the SCaLE 10x. Got a passion you'd like to share? Have a community you'd like to connect with? Want some open discussion on a topic? Create or join a BoF session on either Friday or Saturday night at SCaLE 10x.

If you're like most people, getting started with an app like Krita can be intimidating. Working with a graphics tablet takes as much getting used to as learning to draw with ink and paint. How all the settings and tools work together when "used correctly" is a whole other problem. Fortunately, Krita has just released a training DVD that shows novices how it's done, and helps fund development at the same time.

LXer Feature: 25-Dec-2011

For Christmas this year I bring you a LXWR overloaded with FOSS goodness such as Larry the Free Software Guy spends a "Week in Limbo", BT gives the gift of a patent war to Google, Ubuntu..a Linux apart, two original articles entitled "Why The Linux Desktop Still Rocks" and "Why Linux Desktop Makes Total Sense", the 5 types of very annoying Linux users and last but not least Helios gets to play Santa..and likes it. Enjoy!

One of the reasons that many hated the Unity desktop in Ubuntu is because there is a lack of customization option. People switched from Windows/Mac to Linux is mainly because Linux offers them an environment where they can customize everything to their liking. When Canonical reduced your ability to do what you want with your desktop, many people start to grunt about it and some even switched to Linux Mint.

The Document Foundation has announced its first bug hunting session for version 3.5 of the open source LibreOffice office suite – to be held online on 28 and 29 December. On those days, the Quality Assurance (QA) team and some experienced developers will be available on the IRC channel #libreoffice (IRC link) from 8am to 10pm UTC and will accept bug reports not only via Bugzilla, usually the only option, but also by chat and email.

This article is a bit different from my usual column in two ways. First, it's starting with a hardware and software combo—something I've not done before. Second, the projects are linked to each other and come recommended to me by Perth LUG member, Simon Newton.

A decade after MIT began to put its teaching materials and lectures online via the OpenCourseWare platform, the university has announced that it will leverage these materials to provide an online certification program, currently termed MITx. Although these certificates won't have the same weight as an MIT degree, they will indicate mastery of specific subject areas. The whole system will be built on top of an open-source software platform, which may enable other universities to follow in MIT's footsteps.

X-Server 1.12 will include proper support for touch screens with multitouch capabilities. All three major manufacturers of graphics hardware for PCs have released new drivers. Linux 3.0 is still being maintained even though Linux 3.1 has already been out for a few weeks.

Packet capture is one of the most fundamental and powerful ways to do network analysis. You can learn virtually anything about what is going on within a network by intercepting and examining the raw data that crosses it. Modern network analysis tools are able to capture, interpret and describe this network traffic in a human-friendly manner.

Using the new Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge processor, Scientific Linux 6.1, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and Solaris 11 11/11 were benchmarked when having a different number of CPU cores enabled to see how well each operating system scales up to six cores plus Hyper Threading.

For all of the progress Android has made in the last year in establishing itself as the leading smartphone operating system, commanding over a 46 percent market share according to comScore in its Q3 findings and sending RIM and its BlackBerry well on its way towards platform irrelevance, so many other distracting things went on that kept it from fully realizing its true potential.

LXer Feature: 19-Dec-2011

In the news this past week we had Dell pulling out of the Netbook market, CNet caught adding malware to Download.com, two articles on how 2011 was apparently not a good year for Linux and our own Emery Fletcher's rendition of 'The Day The Desktop Died'. Enjoy!

Dell has discontinued making consumer netbooks and appears to be ready to phase out its Latitude business netbooks in favor of larger ultrabooks, says an industry report. The netbook shutdown follows Dell's termination of sales of its Streak 7 Android tablet earlier this month.

Amazon may dominate public cloud computing, but not amongst the Microsoft groupies. Microsoft has managed to be an end-to-end cradle-to-grave supplier within the data centre, and is attempting to extend this motherly embrace to the cloud with its Azure platform. Cracks have recently begun to show in this strategy, however, as Microsoft increasingly turns to open-source technologies like Hadoop to spice up Azure. Is this a stopgap strategy or a sign of a more open Microsoft cloud?

The security-conscious will tell you that a multi-factor authentication scheme involves requiring items from two or more of the categories "things you know," "things you have," and "things you are." Passwords and passphrases both fall under the "things you know" umbrella, and while there are commercially viable options for the latter two categories — security dongles and biometric fingerprint scanners, for example — neither have taken off with the general public. Partly that is a cost issue, to be sure, but the complexity of public-key infrastructure (PKI) smart cards does not help, either.

Everyone likes personal cloud services, like Apple’s iCloud, Google Music, and Dropbox. But, many of aren’t crazy about the fact that our files, music, and whatever are sitting on someone else’s servers without our control. That’s where ownCloud comes in.

Proprietary social networking platforms have a few distinct issues for free software users, but one of the biggest is that it is often hard — if not impossible — to extract your information from them. With Twitter, for example, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and wait for more tweets to load via JavaScript, but you can't sort and analyze them yourself. But that's exactly what the open source application ThinkUp does for you.