Mageia 6 Artwork Contest, Debian Dumps i586, New Math
Topping the Linux news today was Debian's decision to drop support for the 586-class of processors along with several others. In other news, Mageia announced the artwork contest for version 6 and Unixmen.com offered their list of top 10 Linux distributions for 2016. Elsewhere, Jack Germain liked using the new Vivaldi Web browser and Michael Larabel peeked ahead at some of the features coming in LibreOffice 5.2.
Ben Hutchings, kernel developer who just celebrated 10 years with Debian, recently announced the end of support for 586-class CPUs. i486s were dropped in 6.0 so this move wasn't totally surprising. Other processors given the heave-ho as of Linux 4.3 include AMD K5 & K6s, Cyrix III, Pentium & Pentium MMX, and VIA C3. i686s are still supported.
Donald 'Schultz' Stewart announced the commencement of the Mageia 6 artwork contest. It's that special time of development where community members are given a chance to put their contributions into the distribution. Schultz said, "We’d like to see your backgrounds, screensavers, icons, colour schemes and any other ideas that you can dream up." The contest began Saturday and will run through May 23. Winners will be announced via blog and receive some swag for their efforts. See the full post for rules and guidelines. In related news, the lovely and talented Anne Nicolas, founder of Mageia, was included in a "women to watch" slideshow today for all her work in Open Source.
Mohammad Forhad Iftekher listed his choices for top 10 Linux distributions of 2016 today. He began his list with the ever-popular Linux Mint, followed by Debian. He likes Debian's stability, community support, and number of packages. Ubuntu was third with openSUSE coming in fourth. The "secure, stable and sustainable" Mageia made the list in the number 8 spot and the "most customizable" Arch Linux pulled up the rear.
In other news:
* An Early Look At Some Of The New Features Of LibreOffice 5.2
* Doc Searls: Privacy and the New Math
* Vivaldi Browser Is a Breath of Fresh Air