openSUSE and PCLOS Highlight Community Builds with KDE

by Ostatic Staff - Feb. 20, 2016

Douglas DeMaio today blogged of two community distributions based on openSUSE that offer the latest in KDE Plasma and Applications. openSUSE has commonly been a showcase for cutting-edge KDE builds, so this just seems fitting. In other news, the PCLOS project highlighted a community build featuring KDE 3 fork Trinity and a high-profile Ubuntu developer addressed concerns over ZFS licensing issues.

While Tumbleweed is stalled, Douglas DeMaio brought two cutting edge distributions to users' attention. Argon is based on stable Leap 42.1 and Krypton is based on Tumbleweed. Both offer the latest in KDE Plasma, Frameworks, and Applications packages. These community build installable live images can be downloaded from download.opensuse.org. DeMaio reassured, "openSUSE has extensive experience in providing almost-daily Git snapshots of KDE software: the Unstable OBS repositories have been running without issues for several years." New media is available weekly and new packages become available daily. The repositories are automagically configured in package management, but prospective users are warned that breakage can occur.

Speaking of Tumbleweed, Dominique Leuenberger posted his weekly review of Tumbleweed today covering a couple of builds including yesterday's 20160212. Noteworthy apps include GCC 5.3.1, Mozilla 44, and Plasma 5.5.4. He also addressed the slowdown in Tumbleweed image release repeating the same news DeMaio broke last night. So, for now, the community waits for further updates on the project.

The PCLinuxOS project today highlighted a community build of their own featuring the Trinity desktop. In a short but sweet pointer, the PCLOS Website asked, "Do you long for the days when your desktop was simple and easy to navigate while being light on resources? If yes then check out the Trinity (formerly KDE 3) Desktop on PCLinuxOS." Several versions are available in the familiar PCLOS vernacular (big daddy, minime, etc.) in 64 and 32 bit images. More at the subproject homepage.

The Ubuntu project officially announced inclusion of the ZFS filesystem in the next release of Ubuntu, but some folks wondered the GPL-incompatible CDDL license that keeps it out of the Linux kernel should keep it out of Ubuntu as well. Well, rest assured Ubuntu representatives say it's fine. Today Ubuntu contributor Dustin Kirkland said, "We at Canonical have conducted a legal review and concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses." Case closed. He briefly explained why and concluded, "As we have already reached the conclusion, we are not interested in debating license compatibility."

And finally, Stephen O'Grady today posted of the top programming languages for January 2016. The top languages are JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, C#, and C++. Also in the top 20 are R, Perl, and Visual Basic. Visual Basic?

In other Linux and Open Source news:

* Kuhn's Paradox

* A sub-$300 Thinkpad with great Linux support

* Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically

* Linux and breakfast cereal: Why are there so many flavours?

* Singing About the Year of the Linux Desktop