Voice of the Masses: What was your FOSS highlight of 2014?
Yes, 2014 is nearly over, and it’s been quite a year for Free Software. As the Linux Voice team prepares to meet up for our final podcast of the year, we want to hear from you: what event from the last 12 months really stands out to you? Maybe it’s a new release of your favourite software or distro, or a quote from a certain FOSS celebrity. Perhaps you converted someone to Linux, or made an awesome discovery via our Finds of the Fortnight™.
Whatever the case, let us know in the comments below, and we’ll read out the best in our special festive podcast!
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
Maybe »highlight« doesn’t quite nail it – but the final breakthrough for systemd in 2014 might be the most important thing that happened to FLOSS/GNU-Linux.
By far, Linux Voice. The rest, business as usual.
(Do I need to explain the reasons? They seem obvious.)
The Atom editor from github – just a phenomenal GUI editor that’s free.
And although not new this year – Ansible – client free config management over SSH – has just changed how I provision servers for the better, it made fixing heartbleed across the fleet a breeze.
Calibre. Having always been slightly uncomfortable with my choice of a Kindle as my e-reader many moons ago, and thus leaving myself at the mercy of Amazon, this fantastic tool has allowed me to backup all my e-books & do with them whatever I want 🙂 A donation is on its way.
The launch of Linux Voice – no contest.
I will also say the launch of Linux Voice. I just renewed my subscription, and will keep doing so.
Apart from the obvious launch of Linux Voice.
I have been very impressed with the rise of Openstack and Docker in the enterprise.
Seconded
Fedora 21 finally released. Right in the last month of 2014.
Apart from LV, the launch of Ubuntu MATE. You can boot into it and pretend that Unity was just a horrible dream, safe in the knowledge that things are back to normal.
Thanks to the excellent tutorial in Linux Voice, plus the LV video, I finally feel comfortable using vim. I not even close to being intermediate, but vim no longer intimidates me. I use it daily with Mutt.
Second would be this: As the Opera browser seems to have forsaken its Linux users and also seems to be gutting their product of features I most rely on, such as the integrated mail and RSS client (which have been released as a separate application for Windows), discovering the versatility of Mozilla’s Seamonkey suite.
LV, no doubt
Heartbleed, although bad news it called our attention to not blindly accept open source alone as a quality mark. The end result was more investment in openssl as well as other project focusing more on security, recently I read about curl doing just that.
It didn’t make open source look good but it made it better.
I don’t know if it really qualifies as a ‘FOSS’ highlight, but for me a big highlight has been some of the games I’ve bought and played because they now support my preferred (FOSS) operating system. I’m talking about real games like Civilization 5 and Borderlands 2. Indie games are great, but sometimes I want to play a really awesome, polished, 20+ hour game. Bioshock infinite showed up unexpectedly in steam just the other day. I can’t run it yet, but it looks like I might be able to as soon as next month.
It’s not FOSS software per se, but for me the definite highlight in the last year has been the beginnings of support for mainstream games.
Also, trolling Lennart. 😉
Snowdrift.coop reaching it’s minimum funding goal was definitely my FLOSS highlight. Hope 2015 sees it bearing fruit.
Other FLOSS events of 2014 I was happy to see:
* Publication of copyleft.org (hope guide to CC BY-SA added in 2015)
* Free Art License declared compatible with CC BY-SA (not directly FLOSS, but here’s hoping GPL is added to the list in 2015)
* All those donations to the Ada Initiative
* PyCharm Community Edition
* Agree with the pros/cons of Heartbleed and Shellshock
My highlight was after all these years, finally landing a job where I can concentrate on Linux and not deal with the noise of all of the other OSes. There are other people for that. 😉
KXStudio, Qtractor, Carla, OpenAV programs, Non Session Manager, DISTHRO plugins, MOD DUO, OpenPandora, etc.
I followed how they evolved this year, and it’s amazing what they did.
My daughter’s mental arithmatic has come on in leaps and bounds since she started playing TuxMath. So that get’s my vote.
The launch of LV and the release of Ubuntu MATE. Full disclosure, I make Ubuntu MATE
Aside from LV I’d like to put in a vote for MicroPython, both the language implementation and the hardware board. The ability to write embedded applications in Python, on various cheap ARM hardware, and with support for features like interrupts and embedded assembler, is awesome. As is the team behind it.
I just rediscovered adding “Defaults insults” to the top of the sudoers file. It insults you when you mistype your password. This is why I love FOSS.
Programmers are hilarious and you miss a lot of fun in closed source enterprise software. I bet there are funny easter eggs in Microsoft products, but they will probably never get to see the light of console.
Apart from the obvious (Nick Veitch), for me it was ubuntu-mate. After 10.04 was EOL’d, it was like I’d been booted out of home and was couchsurfing until this distro arrived.
(again) Linux Voice
But would like to highlight:
Steam* {OS, box, etc}, LibreOffice, LightWorks (not trully FOOS, but great work on advanced video editing for linux!)