Voice of the Masses: What was your Linux highlight of 2015?
Yes, 2015 is coming to a close, and very soon the Linux Voice team will gather together for a festive podcast and some lovely home brew. In preparation, we want to hear from you: what was your Linux or Free Software highlight of the past 12 months? Maybe it was the release of a specific distro, or perhaps you discovered some FOSS that made your life much easier. Maybe the adoption of Linux and/or LibreOffice by governments and institutions around the world put the biggest smile on your face.
Whatever the case, let us know your thoughts in the comments below and we’ll read out the best in our super-duper end-of-year podcast (featuring a special rant from Ben)!
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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.
The unknown kernel update that brought support for the gyroscope in my hybrid laptop is pretty high on the list simply because it was unexpected and so all the more joyful. Also, 2015 was the year that I realized that WINE had become so amazingly good that I gparted ways with the last Windows install in the house.
Oh yeah, and on slightly less personal, slightly more common interest note, the news that the city I live in, Aarhus, Denmark, intends to move to open source software and open standards (http://news.softpedia.com/news/denmark-s-second-largest-city-aarhus-is-dropping-microsoft-s-products-for-open-source-496752.shtml)
In the beginning of this year, I was writing software specifications in LibreOffice with diagrams in SVG inserted in the documents. It surprised me very much that MSWord does NOT support SVG in documents! So, we had the (.NET) developers install LibreOffice to be able to read the diagrams in the documents. One of them already had OpenOffice installed – that works, too.
This felt like a victory for me!
I find SVG support a killer feature for LibreOffice.
My second discovery was the use of Sphinx and git for documentation: it is nowadays easy enough to use a markup language for documentation, replacing the word processor completely. In combination with git, it is a huge advantage to work with text files instead of ODF, DOC, etc.
The highlight for me was taking possession of, and falling in love with, my Jolla Smartphone.
A low-point was finding out last month that Jolla have applied for debt restructuring, the Finnish version of protection from creditor.
This is a real shame. The Jolla Smartphone and their Sailfish OS are lovely, and it’s all Linux goodness under the hood.
I just switched last year back to Linux after 10 years of OS X. And in the beginning of this year I learned to know tiling/dynamic WMs and i3. That totally changed my workflow and always when I have a look at a stacking/composing WMs again, it feels really cumbersome to work with them. So the discovery of i3 it is I’d say.
Ardour 4.x series. Fantastic.
My personal highlight was finally become competent–not expert, but competent and no longer intimidated–in vim, thanks in large part to Linux Voice’s tutorial and video.
Exactly the same happend to me. It was also interesting to observe how my initial aversion towards vim turned into an absolute vim devotion. I have become such a vim adept that I yearn for vim-like keyboard shortcuts in other programs. Thank you Mike & Linux Voice for this tremendous gift!
You may already know, but you can get Vim keybindings in Firefox with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimperator/
For me, it has been the liberation of dumping my Google/Linux phone for a GNU/Linux phone, running Ubuntu. It has a lot of rough edges, but it treats me as a user, developer or administrator; rather than a customer or commodity. I felt the same way when I dumped Windows for SuSE, all those years ago.
I have three things. First, the Ctrl-R command recall search in bash that I heard about on your podcast has been a tremendous time saver over typing endless Up-Arrows. Second is Meld (this one may not be strictly Linux as I believe it is available for Windows also). It’s the best file comparison tool I’ve ever used. Third is the Linux-based FOSS development eco-sphere that continues to amaze me with the plethora of its offerings. I work in healthcare developing software for the transmission of patient care information between healthcare systems. We are using FOSS interface software running on Linux servers for these transmissions. Every patient in our hospital depends on FOSS for their care delivery. Just the ability to download development software as I need it has saved hours, days and weeks in getting these interfaces running. I want to say a big heart-felt “Thank you” to all of the FOSS developers for affecting patient’s lives in such a positive manner.
The last M$ PC was decommissioned at home at the beginning of the year. SAMBA was replaced with NFS.
We are now pure FOSS.
L/X/Ubuntu on user PCs/LTs, Debian on servers.
DD-WRT on the main router.
Astrix phone system . . . . Lifes good.
This year I switched for the first time to a 100% free GNU/Linux distribution (Parabola). I also finally started learning a serious text editor (Emacs).
Alex Booker’s brilliant Youtube series on customising i3wm, which turned an exceptionally powerful desktop experience (and 2014’s highlight for me) into an incredibly beautiful desktop experience, too.
January 27, Grim Fandango released on Steam.
I used my Kubuntu installation as my routine daily computer all year with no problems.
Manjaro XFCE makes old Pentium 4 PCs “fly” with the latest software!
For me, the biggest Linux highlight of 2015 was the release of the privacy nightmare called Windows 10. Best reason I can think of to stay with or switch to Linux.
(I know this is a little late for the podcast, but I just wanted to share)
For me, it would be getting my dad to ditch XP on his older Lenovo laptop in favour of XUbuntu 14.04. He was reluctant, but has finally accepted it, and can use it fine, with CorelDraw (installed via PlayOnLinux). He rarely uses this laptop but I felt that XP has had its time (and with major security holes no longer being patched).
Got a actual working installation of Gentoo!
For me the absolute highlight was the raise of Arch Linux based distros such as Manjaro, Antergos and others, and seeing them becoming more friendly for new users and people who always thought Linux = *buntu.
My highlight is discovering and appreciating the quality in open source software. One particular example is KiCad, an open source electronics CAD package. Even Linux fans with no interest in electronics will appreciate the logical workflow and user interface. Perhaps this is the year of Linux on the desktop?
switching away from gmail web app back to thunderbird again. I really hope it continues to get love post mozilla. I had not used thunderbird in a while, I forgot how good it is. It felt like rediscovering e-mail. Gmail has slowly ratcheted up the confusion in their ui in a way reminiscent of boiling lobsters in a pot. I had come to think I did not like e-mail, but turns out e-mail ins’t broken it’s just the interface for the web app and phone app, and don’t get me started on macs terrible e-mail client.