Linux Ruled 2014, Codenames, and Steam Linux Sales
There were lots of interesting tidbits in today's Linux feeds. Silviu Stahie wonders if Linux's advancements in 2014 were enough to finally declare it the "year of Linux." Elsewhere, Larry Cafiero laments Fedora's decision to forgo codenames and Kevin Fenzi explains what happened to Fedora servers yesterday after release. Jack M. Germain reviews How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know and GOL explains how Steam computes Linux sales.
Today in Linux news Silviu Stahie from Softpedia.com today wrote that Linux made a lot of progress in 2014, but was it enough to declare it the year of Linux on the desktop? That phrase has been used so many times by now that it's lost its effectiveness. But what is the criteria and who decides the winner? Nevertheless, Stahie says that with all the big companies using Linux and all the games being ported, that "yes" we can say 2014 was the year of Linux on the desktop. He concludes, "The Linux desktop totally ruled in 2014."
Steam publishes their user stats monthly and GamingOnLinux explained today how games get counted as Linux or Windows sales. First, it depends on the platform used when purchase made; but then after seven days the platform that saw the most play gets the call. They quote Ryan Icculus Gordon saying that install and play it on Linux for a week so they'll count it as a Linux sale.
Larry Cafiero says he misses the codenames Fedora community used to vote on for their releases. They recently quit doing that because of the disruption the process created. Codenames were internal nicknames developers used to refer to releases to distinguish between them easier. Regular users liked them as well just for fun, but with Ubuntu it became something that was included every mention. Cafiero also talks a bit about how other distributions use codenames, so check that out.
In other news:
* How Linux Works Is an OS Mechanic's Mainstay
* Fedora Infrastructure release day retrospective
* Xubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn - Quite brilliant