Linux at 25, Windows Alternatives, Tumbleweed Latest

Today in Linux news Sandra Henry-Stocker looked at how far Linux has come since its humble beginnings 25 years ago. Elsewhere, Lifehacker.com has four alternatives to Windows 10 and Matt Asay wrote that Red Hat is the only profitable Open Source company because they sell piece of mind rather than software. Tumbleweed is poised to accept recently released Plasma 5.7 and Slackware received two security updates this week.

Happy Birthday Linux. Sandra Henry-Stocker said Linux turns 25 sometime this year depending upon when you celebrate it. Since then it has grown to phenom status. She said there are probably 258 distributions according to Wikipedia and Distrowatch has the number of active distros at 273. "It is quite remarkable that so much came from a project that started out so modestly. Linus' early efforts and the participation of more than 10,000 programmers have had a huge impact on the computer industry and on how so many of us work today," she noted. So, whether you celebrate August 25 when Linus first mailed the Minux mailing list or October 5 when he announced his first release and asked for testers, be sure to wish Linux and Linus a happy 25th.

Lifehacker.com posted their picks for best alternatives to Windows 10. Number one on their list, come on you can guess, that's right: Ubuntu. Ubuntu was followed by Chrome OS and Hackintosh. And pulling up the rear was Linux Mint because it "looks similar to Windows in many ways."

Tumbleweed is about to merge the recently released KDE Plasma 5.7 according to today's review by Dominique "Dimstar" Leuenberger. That KDE release was touted by the press and bloggers for its progress towards replacing X11 with Wayland; although it's the next release that's earmarked as an LTS. The next couple of Tumbleweed snapshots should bring Linux 4.6.3 as well. This week brought Mesa 12.0, LibreOffice 5.2-rc1, and the newly minted PulseAudio 9.0.

Slackware received two security updates this week. Thunderbird was updated on July 5 and Samba was updated yesterday, both for security isses. I've found that updating on Slackware with slackpkg is reminiscent of apt-get upgrade or urpmi --update. The documentation has a script example for automatically checking for updates and informing the user.

In other news:

* Only one company is making any money with Open Source

* Haven Moon rises today on Windows, Mac, and Linux

* Fedora Media Writer Looks To Take On A Primary Role In Fedora 25