Linux Best & Worst, Live Patchin', and Devuan Good
It was a fairly slow news day today in Linuxville. Nevertheless, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains why 2014 "was the best of years, it was the worst of years." Gary Newell asks if the Debian-fork Devuan is a good idea and Serdar Yegulalp looks at the competing live kernel patchers and Fedora 21 is reviewed again, twice.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reviews the highs and lows in Linux of the year today. On the down side he lists Heartbleed, the systemd wars, and the decline of the Open Source license. The good includes all those Linux-based smartphones, Docker, cloud, and programmers' preference. After adding up all the pluses and minuses, Vaughan-Nichols says, "It's been a good year for Linux and open-source software. Next year will be even better."
Everyday Linux User Gary Newell today asked if forking Debian into Devuan was a good idea. He says if folks didn't like systemd, they should have chosen another distribution - even though the number of hold-outs is dwindling. He thinks it's wasted effort and compares trying to compile a complete clone-sans-systemd to "creating an exact clone of the United Kingdom and moving it slightly to the left." He thinks those who will lose out the most are those that don't care about systemd one way or the other.
InfoWorld.com's Serdar Yegulalp yesterday said that given the choice of Kgraft, Kpatch, or new hybrid of two that "a winner is in, and it amounts to all of the above." The new hybrid comes from a Red Hat developer and "not only does it fuse ideas from both Kgraft and Ksplice, it accepts patches used by either solution." But then again, Yegulalp said CoreOS or "delivering Linux as a service" is another trend in this area to watch.
And finally on this Christmas Eve 2014 we have two reviews of Fedora 21. Arindam Sen reviewed the GNOME version and said the live image was crashy and unable to provide screenshots, but the installation was quick and easy. The desktop was pretty but performance was off a bit. However, with an overall score of 9.2 out 10.0, Fedora 21 is recommended for those "fed up with Unity/Ubuntu/."
Dedoimedo.com today reviewed Fedora 21 KDE edition, having recently put Fedora 20 on his best distros of 2014 list. He didn't have issues with the KDE live image but reported installation issues and "bootloader nightmares." He found a buggy login manager, inoperative desktop effects, and a resource hog among other problems. Dedomedo asked in conclusion, "Why did Fedora 21 have to be so buggy?"