Linux Ebb & Flow, Red Hat Oops, and Chakra Reviewed

There's rarely a dull moment when looking through Linux newsfeeds. Today we find Jesse Smith has reviewed Chakra GNU/Linux 2014.02. LinuxInsider.com looks at why distributions gain popularity then disappear. And finally, The Register covers a bit of convention confusion between Red Hat and cloud newcomer Piston.

First up today is Jesse Smith's review of Chakra GNU/Linux 2014.02 in this week's Distrowatch Weekly. Chakra derived from Arch and sits somewhere between 30 and 45 in the Distrowatch Page Hit Rankings. Smith gives Chakra a pretty good workout and concludes:

Chakra has some nice features and it does some interesting things. I love how amazingly fast the project's build of KDE is on my hardware and I like that the project does some things a bit differently. I like that the team has put together an increasingly comprehensive collection of documentation. In short, I feel Chakra has made positive progress over the past year. The project is well worth a look.

LinuxInsider's Katherine Noyes looks at why distributions seem to disappear. Two examples used are Fuduntu and SolusOS. Noyes spokes to Distrowatch founder Ladislav Bodnar who said they may have been overambitious and suffered "developer burnout." Noyes speaks to other community notables but basically concludes that's just the way the Linux world is and that's probably a good thing.

Red Hat got a bit of bad press last Friday when The Register broke the news that some disagreement arose between Piston cloud upstart and Red Hat at the Red Hat Summit. The Register's Jack Clark reported that Red Hat kicked Piston out of the summit probably because "Red Hat lost out on a valuable business deal to Piston." Soon after, The Register reported that Red Hat changed their minds and Piston could attend, but see their complete coverage for the full story. Forbes is running a piece with more detail as well.

Today's bonus link is What's the best Linux desktop environment for me?.