Voice of the Masses: Biggest event/story/project of 2013
We’re coming to the end of what’s been an amazing year for Linux, open source and Free Software. Never have we, as a community, garnered so much coverage and positivity. And for Friday’s podcast, we want to know your thoughts on what has been your major event, story or project from the last 12 months.
There are almost too many to choose between: the continued popularity of $MYDISTRO, Linux winning in Munich, the extent to which we’re all being spied on by our governments, two million Raspberry Pis, lots of Ubuntu stories (both good and bad), monumental crowdfunding campaigns from Canonical and, er, us, the end of Puppy, the beginning of a commercially-backed Cyanogen-mod, XBMC usurping MythTV, Gnome struggling whilst KDE goes from strength to strength (plus a major Qt release with official Android support), and plenty of patent disputes, the rise and rise of Google, and Valve’s release of SteamOS as desktop Linux becomes a games console.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, and we’ll include your thoughts in this week’s podcast! See you Friday!
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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.
On the down side – the Snowden revelations. Mr Stallman has perhaps been proved to be more correct than some previously thought. The slightly more positive take on this is that, as a consequence of these stories, many more people now think and talk about the implications of using technology. Open source and free libre software now seem to be frequently cited as ways of regaining control over our (digital) lives.
On the up side – Raspberry Pi. What a wonderful success. Giving children (and indeed, many others) the opportunity to combine their imagination with technology. The Meccano of the 21st century? Combined with such things as Young Rewired State, this could be the generation that leads us to the golden future we were always promised. Whizz for Atomms!
My major event was putting a SSD drive in my desktop, not cheap, but cheaper than a new PC and it has made things much quicker. Not really a world-shaking event though. 😉
Surely the biggest news is Steam – it's probably the biggest news of the past 10 years for linux. I hope they're doing it because it makes good business sense, not because of an ideological reason (even if I believe in that ideology). If it works, I think it'll bring all sorts of benefits to linux.
I have to agree with Duncan. SteamOS is huge news, and because it's done for business reasons it should mean that it won't just fade away in 6 months and will hopefully keep pushing Linux (in particular graphics card driver support) forward.
I don't think by itself it will make Linux a desktop OS for the majority of people though. Windows will still be supported by game developers and SteamOS is "just" for living rooms. It will make a few people happy that they don't need to duel boot anymore.
Many Linux podcast/blog/review mentioned the same item over and over, e.g. when $MYDISTRO,Gnome,*Buntu was released, everyone reports it – sometimes it sound just a little repeatative.
What about the "little" guys, openbox (you've mentioned Crunchbang) and fluxbox (using fluxbox with kde apps, dolphin.k3b etc, this makes KDE apps very usable).
What about truecypt, axcrypt equivalent.
What about boring distros but easy to update distros like Debian.
Cheers
In the world, the Snowden revelations; in Linux, though I don't know if for coming out at the end of the year, Valve's support for Linux
Steam on Linux, SteamOS, Steam Box ect..
Also Mint 15/16
For me personally it would be Football Manager 2014 running natively on Linux via a native Steam client and the continued growth of game titles for Linux on Steam.
In the grander scheme of things probably Raspberry Pi and Android.
My biggest discovery of 2013 was Owncloud. That made great strides in 2013. And Owncloud 6 should be another step forward for 2014.
Looking forward to trying it out myself;)
I have to agree with Steam. Even though I am not a gamer at all, I am aware of the huge push that gaming had for the development of the PC. I hope that in a year from now we finally won't have to fiddle around with proprietary drivers and missing features on high end graphics cards any more because of Steam. And one more reason for dualbooting is gone. Now we just need to replace Microsoft Word and Photoshop and we can celebrate the long awaited YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP (play thunderstorm noise here)!
Debian announcing they're going for Xfce is pretty big news.
Outside GNU/Linux circles, Valve's Linux endorsement brought attention to us from Gamers (who were previously ignorant of or scoffed at Linux). Gaming is the no. 1 entertainment industry in the world.
Wayland got the distro communities' love as an X replacement.
on the Linux desktop: Nemo file browser, Cinnamon 2.0
on the rest of the world: big spy conspiracy
OggCamp was the big one for me. I would say that as I helped organise it, but I genuniely believe it was the best its ever been this year.
Other than that, my two big ones are unfortuantely closed source; Steam for Linux and BitTorrent Sync. The former is surely going to drive Linux adoption both among users and game developers, while the second lets me sync my files between machines without relying on a probably-spied-on server in the middle.
Without doubt, the biggest disaster story in 2013 from the open source point of view is the closure of Groklaw. Without Pamela Jones' fair, incisive and destructive anaylisis of the Big Corporation Patent troll, the open source community has lost a good soldier.
The biggest (but hidden) battle is that bewteen Mir vs Wayland
The best story is the rise of the alternative desktops environments and the fact that now more people learn to code on Linux because of the Raspberry Pi than any other tool for Linux ever created.
I would just like to say that the work on the open source drivers for all video chips has made some impressive jumps this year. Intel and amd have been great helping the open source effort, but hats off to the nouveau team for there reverse engineering work. Maybe not the main event of the year but it's nice to get good performance out of the box.
The pleasant surprise for me is the uptake and continuing popularity of crowdfunding … To be honest when I first heard of the Linux Voice's target of 90k UK pounds, I was a bit skeptical that it would reach the goal… really glad that it blazes past through 🙂
I'm hopeful for the era where crowdfunding is the default "engine of economy", and corporations/venture capitalists take the back seat…
What else could be powered by crowdfunding next? How about research in education / medicine / healthcare ? and of course, more crowdfunded journalism please …
For me it's Linuxvoice! To put a project into the focus and not primarly the money (shareholder value) is definitely a more sustainable approach …
Should be a role model for other projects/ companies as well …
Congrats for your courage!
Dogecoin! Such profit, so amaze, wow