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I had to laugh at the notion that a Linux distribution operated by a multi-national for-profit company that’s pretty much wholly owned by a charismatic billionaire could ever be considered, by any stretch of the imagination, a community thing.

It's official: Microsoft's near-monopoly on personal computing is over. At least, so says Ubuntu founder (and space traveler) Mark Shuttleworth, who has declared Ubuntu's infamous Bug #1 -- titled "Microsoft has a majority market share" -- closed. Actually, Shuttleworth's ruling says much more about Canonical's future focus on tablets, smartphones and the cloud than it does about Microsoft's traditional dominance of the OS market. But it still offers huge insight into where Ubuntu is headed in the future, and the types of challenges on the horizon for Canonical.

Karl Denninger compares the mobile and desktop OS figures for his forum.

Door Kickers is an innovative Real-Time Tactics game that puts you in charge of a SWAT team. We broke the news about it coming to you last month. I had a chance to test it before the Linux version went out (thank you developers!) and fell in love with it, good graphics mixed with interesting gameplay. It actually reminded me of Frozen Synapse a little bit. Analyze the situation, plan team routes, choose equipment and breach points and coordinate multiple troopers to reach the hostage room before the bad guys get to press that trigger.

Most shared hosting packages and even most shared hosting reseller accounts don’t offer a choice of operating systems. When they do, the choice is often only between Linux and Windows, with Linux being whatever distro they have on their servers, which is subject to change without notice at upgrade time. However, when you step up into the VPS or dedicated server world, you’ll find yourself being offered a choice like the one we’re offering in our poll.

Microsoft can only hope that it's re-invention of Windows 8, Windows 8.1 aka Blue, works because Windows 8 continues to fall behind even Vista's dismal desktop operating system market acceptance numbers. As for the mobile operating system space, Microsoft needs a miracle.

From headline-grabbing threats by Microsoft to more subdued court battles involving the cloud, the open-source ecosystem has a pretty good record of winning patent challenges. But a crushing defeat has now tarnished that record with Google's (GOOG) grudging surrender in a campaign to make the open-source VP8 video codec ubiquitous across the Web. Free-software stalwarts need not panic, though: In this case, they can blame Google, not a systemic failure by the open-source world itself.

While there's OpenCL drivers available for Linux, on Ubuntu there is no OpenCL driver shipped by default and the proprietary driver implementations aren't always great. Intel has their closed-source OpenCL SDK for the CPU, AMD has their OpenCL support in the Catalyst driver, and NVIDIA has their OpenCL/CUDA support bundled within their binary driver. When it comes to open-source support, the Gallium3D OpenCL support is still primitive and isn't shipped by default. Intel has the Beignet project for open-source OpenCL but that's even worse off than the Gallium3D OpenCL support.

The fourth release candidate to the Linux 3.10 kernel is now available. Last week Linus Torvalds was upset with 3.10-rc3 being so large, but now he's happier that this new kernel is smaller in size than its predecessor. The work found in Linux 3.10-rc4 is the usual assortment of bug fixes across the driver and architecture subsystems in particular.

Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) number eight is been released and this is the list of games that you’ll find this time: Dear Esther, Capsized, Awesomenauts, Thomas Was Alone, and Little Inferno. If you choose to pay over the average, you’ll also receive Hotline Miami and Proteus!

Bsquare announced an Android 4.2 Mobile Development Platform (MDP) based on Qualcomm’s new 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974) SoC featuring four ARM Krait 400 CPU cores plus an Adreno 330 GPU. The Snapdragon 800 MDP is available in both 11.6-inch tablet and 4.3-inch smartphone versions, and features surround sound, USB 3.0, and 802.11ac WiFi for up to 1.3Gbps streaming rates.

Dozens of computer scientists urged an appeals court today to block the copyright claims over application programming interfaces (APIs) in the Oracle v. Google court battle, arguing that APIs that are open are critical to innovation and interoperability in computers and computer systems.

Last year, I installed and wrote a review for Linux Mint 13 Maya, the MATE version. It had worked really well on my laptop so even when Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" was released, I still kept using Maya. But after a year, I think its the time for an upgrade, and on the same occasion that Linux Mint 15 Olivia was recently out, I decided to download and install the new Linux Mint 15, MATE version.

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 15 'Olivia'. Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project. MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML 5 and two new tools, 'Software Sources' and 'Driver Manager', make their first appearance in Linux Mint. MDM now features 3 greeters (i.e. login screen applications): a GTK+ greeter, a themeable GDM greeter for which hundreds of themes are available, and a brand-new HTML greeter, also themeable which supports a new generation of animated and interactive themes. Cinnamon and MATE screenshots are available.

The IP Commission Report on the "theft" of American IP is the gift that keeps on taking. We've already discussed the commission's suggestion that infringers' computers be loaded up with spyware and malware and the apparent "fact" that China has singlehandendly destroyed every IP-reliant industry in America. Hidden towards the bottom of the report is (yet another) terrible proposal, guided by the heavy hand of self-interest. It plainly spells out the commission's priorities: American IP above all else, even the health and well-being of other nations.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Digikam adds video properties search in Advanced Search tool; Okular better supports annotations in rotated pages; In KDE Workspace, sorting of tasks is possible by activity; the KDE Classic cursor theme becomes an image-based theme; Easier drag and drop of items in Dolphin Places; Network Management shows connection details; Skrooge adds a possibility to open report from dashboard widgets.

Disk encryption is one of those physical security features that determine whether I install a Linux distribution on any computer I use for serious computing. Whether it’s a server, notebook, ultrabook or any other type of *book, if it’s not a crash-and-burn unit, the hard disk drive (HDD) has to be encrypted. And no, it’s not because I have anything to hide, it’s just that personal data should be just that – personal, and private. If you are not authorized (by the owner) to see it, you don’t.

The announcement of the students accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women (OPW) 2013 opens a new chapter in KDE contribution. KDE has participated in GSoC since its first season in 2005. Every year is special and exciting for both the students and the KDE Community. Outstanding students get to try their hands at real world programming, some for the first time and some as experts. They have the experience of working in a free software community, being part of a top technical team.

Canonical’s founder is making controversial moves which are helping Microsoft’s PR. The Shuttleworth position can be summarised as follows: 2004: come join me, we’ll beat an illegal monopoly together. 2013: I’m friends with Microsoft now, never mind that monopoly.

Google today put the squeeze on software vendors with a new policy for vulnerability disclosure that allows its researchers to provide details on zero-day bugs they find within seven days if the affected vendor hasn't provided an advisory or a patch. Google is now dramatically narrowing the patch window for the most dangerous zero-day bugs it discovers and get used in attacks in the wild.