Spotted in the Wild, Perfect Linux, and Six Cool Distros
Today in Linux news, Christine Halls strolls down memory lane to a time when real men still wrote their own drivers and backups were for sissies. Tecmint.com has six cool distributions for your older PC and a couple of favorites were spotted out in the world doing real work. One blogger writes of his year without Windows and there are several interesting gaming notes. We have all this and lots more on this Monday, August 04, 2014.
Christine Hall reminisces about the good ole' Linux days when when Linux first began inching into the "easy-to-use" category. She says she began with Mandrake 9.0. I was a junior-tester on Mandrake's free box list by then because it was beginning to have issues in 8.2ish, if I recall, and they thought more community testers would help. Mandrake 7.2 was the sweet spot for me. I had tried 7.0 and 7.1, but I didn't know how to get the graphics acceptable enough, but with 7.2 (with KDE 1.99, btw) I got 1024x768 out of the box. I never looked back. But I remember those days when modems, sound cards, and 3D graphics didn't work out of the box. In fact, my first time it took a week booting back and forth from Mandrake to Windows to hunt up documentation on the Internet, but that modem finally beep-bop-screeched to life. To me, at that time, Linux was good enough. But see Christine's story at Fossforce.com.
Alan Stainer shared his Linux story today at Mid Sussex Times. He said he went a year without Windows, instead using Ubuntu, and now loves Linux. He was interested in this challenge initially for the same reasons many of us come to Linux - tired of chasing our tails securing Windows. Stainer says he managed to find Linux equivalents for most of favorite Windows applications and a year later - he's now an advocate.
Tecmint.com today posted a list of six cool distributions to revive your older PCs. They begin with SliTaz, which is still only 45MB in download size but requires 256MB RAM (according to Tecmint.com). They mention favorites Puppy and CrunchBang, but you'll have to read their full story for the rest.
Linux was spotted and recorded out in the real world twice recently. Unsolicitedbutoffered today shared shots of Fedora running in Shanghai Honquiao airport. Not to be outdone, Fedora-challenger Ubuntu was recently spotted on a NASA mission.
In other Linux news, Zorin OS 9 is as good as Mint 17, Evolve OS is gorgeous and "MATE is awesome" Don't forget to check out this week's DistroWatch Weekly, which includes a review of Neptune 4.
In gaming news::
* Steam On Linux Now Offers 600+ Games
* Lastest Steam Numbers Show Linux Decline
* Habitat: A Thousand Generations in Orbit trailer
* This Week in Open Source Games: Verdun, ChuChu Rocket, and Duck Marines