Another Debite Quits, Scientific Linux Flop, Mageia 3 EOL
Another day brings another Debian resignation. In other news, Mageia 3 is reaching its end-of-life and The Var Guy has some highlights from SUSECon. Dedoimedo.com says Scientific Linux 7 is "poorly executed" and Mozilla says losing Google partnership promotes choice and innovation. And Softpedia.com said today that Ubuntu's Unity is starting to look like a desktop.
The top story tonight is the resignation of Ian Jackson from the Debian Technical Committee following last night's GR vote. Ian Jackson is a longtime developer best known for dpkg and dgit and once served as Debian Project Leader. Jackson said in his resignation note to the Debian committee mailing list that he is "clearly too controversial a figure at this point" to continue on the committee. Jackson filed the general resolution voted upon last night and with its defeat, Jackson said, "I should step aside to try to reduce the extent to which conversations about the project's governance are personalised. And, speaking personally, I am exhausted." He does plan to continue maintenance of his packages and other software. Calls for nominations to the technical committee have been proposed and nominees may be known by the next meeting December 4.
Scientific Linux is a distribution designed to adapt to scientific computing tasks and software. They say their primary users are "within the High Energy and High Intensity Physics community." Dedoimedo.com said today it is "poorly executed." He began by saying, "The visual appeal of Scientific Linux 7 with the Gnome desktop is average. It neglects real functionality, and it hides away critical components from the users." He wasn't happy with GNOME, multimedia support, the "stupid" installation, the lack of applications, or performance in Scientific. In fact he even questioned the very point of its existence. He concluded, "Scientific Linux 7 is a flop."
Mozilla's Chris Beard today blogged that the 10-year partnership with Google is now history and announced, "We are ending our practice of having a single global default search provider." Yahoo Search will be the new default search engine in Firefox in the U.S. "Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Amazon, Twitter and Wikipedia will continue to be built-in as alternate search options." Beard added that Yahoo will support Do Not Track in Firefox.
In other news:
* Mageia 3 End-of-life November 26
* Purism Librem 15 Linux laptop blends high-end hardware with totally free software
* Unity 8 Is Starting to Look More like a Desktop for Ubuntu
* Linux Outlaws Ride Into the Sunset
* SUSECon 2014: Day One Highlights, SUSE Brings Live Patching and Ceph Storage to Its Enterprise Linux, and Lock-in a danger to open source, says SUSE official