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Today in Open Source: Do too many Linux distros disappear? Plus: Proper Linux advocacy, and photos of the new Ubuntu phones.

I've been playing with the idea of converting to Arch Linux, at least on a trial basis, for some time now.

Welcome again, it's time for a brand new Humble Indie Bundle.... The Humble Indie Bundle 11 is here!

So, this annoyed to the point of having to write about it. Hero Siege was sold on IndieGameStand DRM free and without warning the developer has now removed the DRM free version and has tied it to Steam.

When you install a Linux distribution, a set of programs comes along with it. It's easy to add and delete elements of the programs that don't fit with your needs, but what about altering the look and feel of the distribution to suit you? The key is to add a second desktop environment or window manager. This is an example of how Linux is all about freedom of the user, by the user.

Vendors and original equipment manufacturers (OEM)—and their IT customers, governments, and academics—are all using, buying, and making open source software, and often all three activities at once. This is a good way to think about one’s relationship with open source software projects. There are three activities one typically engages in with respect to the open source software project: make, use, buy.

Stencyl is an interesting toolkit that enables you to create games without traditional programming, and they have just released the big 3.0.

In Barcelona today, Nokia not for the first time laid out its plans to capture the next billion smartphone users. The new approach: Nokia X, a third line of smartphones to slot between the low-end Asha and the high-end Lumia range. The Nokia X range will run the Andrcusoid Open Source Project (AOSP) operating system, but without Google's stack on top of it. Instead, it'll have a Nokia store, Microsoft services, and a custom front-end.

The overview includes only games which are completely free, with a permissive license for both the code and their content. I could not include here games like Urban Terror or Warsow, since their assets are not free, nor Steam games.

Our second official testing release for Parsix GNU/Linux 6.0, code name 'Trev', is available now. This version ships with GNOME Shell 3.10.3 and Linux 3.12.9 kernel built on top of rock-solid Debian 'Wheezy' (7.0) platform. Almost all GNOME packages have been upgraded to the latest stable versions and base packages have been synchronized with Debian 'Wheezy' repositories as of February 16, 2014. The artwork is also pretty much final.

Network Manager is a feature-rich network configuration service which is used by default in most Linux desktop environments nowadays. While Network Manager comes with various sophisticated features, you might just prefer the old plain network service. This tutorial describes how to disable Network Manager in various Linux desktop environments.

For years, KDE software has included a semantic (relationship-based) searching infrastructure. KDE's Semantic Search was built around concepts previously developed in a European Union-funded research project NEPOMUK which explored the use of relationships between data to improve search results. Based on these ideas, KDE's implementation of Semantic Search made it possible to search for all pictures - taken in - a particular place. On top of that, it added text search and tagging.

Per an announcement to the vim developers, Diego Viola who's interested in Neovim explains it as "to refactor and modernize the [vim] codebase." This was already criticized by vim's Bram Moolenaar who was quick to say, "It's going to be an awful lot of work, with the result that not all systems will be supported, new bugs introduced and what's the gain for the end user exactly? Total refactoring is not a solution. It's much better to improve what we have. Perhaps with some small refactorings specifically aimed at making Vim work better for users."

The company, which is famed mostly for its Firefox browser, has partnered with Chinese low-cost chip maker Spreadtrum. While not as powerful as more expensive models, the device will run apps and make use of mobile internet. It would appeal to the sorts of people who currently buy cheap "feature" phones, analysts said.

Any project that does not rely on financial motivation to get workers to contribute needs special skills to encourage people to do their best... and to avoid the terrible effect when a group implodes politically. These hard-won lessons might save YOUR open source project.

To install and run Concrete5 on a Linux VPS with CentOS follow the very easy steps....

As expected, Linus Torvalds announced Sunday night that the fourth Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.14 is now available for download and testing.

Photocrumbs is another spare-time project of mine. Every now and then, I need to quickly throw a handful of photos on the web without going through the rigmaroles of using a full-blown photo sharing solution. So I cobbled together a super simple single-file PHP app for instant photo publishing.

Open source software in healthcare has been instrumental for sharing common tools and increasing adoption of emerging medical information technology (IT) standards. By leading the effort to digitize health data, imaging informatics has set the precedent for the adoption of the technology industry's best practices and subsequently open source software.

Ford will ditch Microsoft in favor of BlackBerry to power its next-generation infotainment systems, inside sources claim, switching to QNX for increasingly complex car multimedia duties after ongoing criticisms of the current SYNC system. The transition, yet to be officially announced by either Ford or BlackBerry, is said to be a reaction to poor driver feedback of SYNC, as well as the expense involved in using Microsoft's platform.