Munich Reversal Turnaround, Linus on the Desktop, and Red Hat Time Protocol

Monday we reported that Munich was throwing in the Linux towel, but today we find that may not be exactly the case. In other news, Linus Torvalds today said he still wants the desktop. There are lots of other LinuxCon links and a few gaming posts to highlight. And finally today, Red Hat's Eric Dube explains RHEL 7's new time protocol.

Munich's Linux reversal, widely reported Monday, may have been a jump-of-the-gun reaction to the new mayor's data request. According to Nick Heath at TechRepublic.com, Munich city council spokesman Stefan Hauf said newly elected mayor "asked the administration to gather the facts so we can decide and make a proposal for the city council how to proceed in future." He said the report is to include many areas of IT and not "solely focused around the question of whether to drop Linux and move back to Windows." So, I guess stay tuned.

LinuxCon has been in many of today's headlines but my favorite is Linus Torvalds said, "I still want the desktop." Sean Michael Kerner covered it in his LinuxCon brief today, as well as being listed among the favorites in Top 10 Quotes from the Linux Kernel Developer Panel. He quoted as saying it's not a kernel problem, "It's a whole infrastructure problem. I think we'll get there one day." Be sure to catch this video by Libby Clark asking trivia questions of attendees and developers.

Eric Dube is continuing the Red Hat series on "What's New?" in Red Hat Enterprise 7 with his Precision Time Synchronization & Network Latency. In it Dube says time synchronization is more critical than most of realize and that nanosecond accuracy is critical in today's "high-speed, low-latency applications." That's why Red Hat ditched NTP for Chrony. Chrony is more accurate and responds faster to system clock changes than NTP did. He also go on to explain that PTP was also included because some hardware out there supports that and it too is better than NTP. See his full article for the rest on that.

In gaming news:

* Sanctum 2 Released for Mac and Linux

* Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Now Visible in the Steam for Linux Database

* From Windows to Linux, Part 3: Games

In other news:

* KDE Applications 4.14 Released

* Free Official Ubuntu Books for Local Teams

* Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 Test 1 Is an Interesting Debian and GNOME 3.12 Combination