LXer Weekly Roundup for 10-Mar-2013

LXer Feature: 10-Mar-2013 The big news this week was Mark Shuttleworth and his feelings on the Ubuntu community and reaction to it. Miguel de Icaza decides to use a Mac full time instead of Linux at home. The Chrome OS resists being cracked into and more. Enjoy!

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Gnome Founder Miguel de Icaza Solves Identity Crisis, Moves To Mac: Today in his personal blog, Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome, and one of the most polarizing personalities in the free software world, announced that he is finished with the Linux platform –at least for personal use.

Chromebook Pixel: Does this device herald Android and Chrome OS's wedding?: Pretty much everyone agrees that Google's Chromebook Pixel is too expensive to just run the Chrome OS Web browser. But what if it could run Android tablet apps as well?

How to kill the X server in Linux: alt-PrintScreen-k does what ctrl-alt-backspace used to do: I had a GNOME Shell crash just now and had to Google myself to figure out how to kill X in the post-ctrl-alt-backspace era. (That means I've written about this before.)

Not convinced by rolling releases: The ‘rolling release’ meme has been a popular one for years in Ubuntu. It’s one of the top requests from members of our user community. And it’s popular with Canonical team members too (who, largely, come from the community and share its values). The problem for me is straightforward: a rolling release isn’t actually a release at all. It offers little certainty for those who need certainty. And we essentially accommodate the need for daily crack with our development releases, which have become highly usable (for developers) because of the strong commitment the Canonical and community teams made to daily quality throughout the release cycle.

On the Ubuntu Community: Charles Profitt, in his recent post Ubuntu: Time to Take the Shot, talks about a meeting that the Community Council had with Mark on Tuesday. This followed a weekend of me doing everything in my power to step back from the recent announcements and discussions from Canonical that made my Thursday and Friday very difficult. As a leader in the community I have been bombarded by comments from fellow community members these past few days. On Monday several members of the Community Council jumped on a hangout to talk about how we were handling all the news coming out, where we felt the community was going and what our role in this was. Immediately following this discussion we reached out to Mark to have a chat ASAP and I wrote an email to the internal Community Council list saying, among other things:

Mark Shuttleworth: Canonical leads Ubuntu, not 'your whims': After several months without posting, Mark Shuttleworth has returned to his official blog with some harsh words for those in the Ubuntu community who have been critical of Canonical's recent efforts to transform the OS into a multi-faceted platform for mobile devices and the cloud. "If you've done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on," Shuttleworth wrote on Thursday morning. "That's normal – there's no need to poison the well behind you just because you want to try something else."

Linux triumphant: Chrome OS resists cracking attempts: Linux, once again, proved to be far more secure than most other operating systems as Google's Linus-based Chrome OS shrugged off its attackers at the $3.14-million Pwnium cracking competition.

R.I.P. LinuxDevices Long live LinuxGizmos!: In 2012, the embedded Linux market lost a valued resource when LinuxDevices.com became a collateral casualty of QuinStreet’s acquisition of a group of websites from Ziff Davis Enterprise. Unfortunately the new owner had no interest in supporting the site, so LinuxDevices has lain dormant ever since the acquisition. As the year wore on, a growing number of individuals and companies urged me (as the site’s founder) to do something to get LinuxDevices back on its feet, or to launch a new site to fill the void.