Rolling Release Round-Up and GNOME's Comeback
Today's tiptoe through the headlines revealed a rolling release round-up in this week's Distrowatch Weekly. Sean M. Kerner touches on the highlights of CAINE Linux and Bruce Byfield asks if GNOME can make a comeback. ChromeOS has been said to have dissed Linux users and several other Linux tidbits are featured in tonight's Linux news watch.
Jesse Smith's feature story in today's Distrowatch Weekly looks at five popular rolling release distributions to see if they can hold up to the daily grind over the long term. Todays' post seems to be setting up the long-term experiment and primarily covers installation and update methods. For the test Smith chose Arch, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE Factory, PC-BSD, and Debian. Some offered a few minor challenges, but nothing major. Smith plans to update each system every week and see if anything breaks. So, check out all those details in this week's Distrowatch Weekly, which also includes a mini-review of Minix 3.3.
Bruce Byfield today said that GNOME "is down," if not out, and wonders "Can GNOME ever regain its former predominance?" The last release got several good reviews, Byfield said they sounded lukewarm at best to him. He runs down a bit of GNOME's history and said the overall impression is of a "project in slow decline." Byfield thinks GNOME needs better public relations. The project needs to keep in touch with its users like KDE does. He said, "GNOME was publicly silent for eighteen months" after the initial release of GNOME 3 and fallout that followed and they aren't doing much better now. Byfield concludes, "So long as the project pretends that everything is business as usual, the most it is likely to do stave off further decline."
In a story that had folks saying ChromeOS stabbed Linux users in the back, ChromeOS developers were planning on "dropping support for ext2, ext3 and ext4 file systems." But by the time I clicked on the headline Chromium - a modified Linux - drops support for Linux filesystems, it had changed to Rebellion sees Chromium reverse plans to dump EXT filesystem. That basically sums up the story right there. ChromeOS developers thought that support was wasted space and energy, but after the backlash, they've probably changed their minds.
In other news:
* CAINE Linux Distribution Helps Investigators With Forensic Analysis
* SEANux – a version of Linux from the Syrian Electronic Army
* Better know an OS: Linux Mint 17.1 "Qiana"
* "Here's what happens when Reg commentards talk about Torvalds' toys"