Strange Bedfellows and Linux Reviews
Christine Hall at FOSS Force today wrote that Canonical's deal with the devil may signal Ubuntu's swan song topping today's Linux news. Linux Tycoon Bryan Lunduke reviewed the Dell M3800 with Ubuntu and Jamie Watson tested six pre-release distributions. To top that off, we have four reviews and a Linux Mint Debian teaser.
Last week Canonical announced an extension of their partnership with Microsoft to certify Canonical's Metal-as-a-Service on Microsoft cloud servers. Canonical says MAAS is tool to set up physical servers as cloud and other services with the push of a button.
Canonical’s MAAS brings the dynamism of cloud computing to the world of physical provisioning and Ubuntu. Connect, commission and deploy physical servers in record time, re-allocate nodes between services dynamically, and keep them up to date and in due course, retire them from use.
Canonical already contracts with Microsoft to sell Ubuntu Docker server implementations on the Azure Marketplace and Christine Hall at FOSS Force implied this latest move may signal a "swan song" for Canonical. She said Novell's deal with Microsoft contributed to its downfall and eventual sell-off and wonders if Canonical may start "to play fast and loose with open source licenses." She said if nothing else, it's gearing up to be a big "brouhaha in the FOSS user community" quoting one commenter saying "Bye-bye Ubuntu." Even Red Hat's hands aren't completely clean in this "Bermuda Triangle."
Speaking of Ubuntu, Bryan Lunduke testdrove a Dell M3800 with Ubuntu recently and said "this beast" is not a desktop replacement, it's a "desktop destroyer." Then he said Ubuntu "works great" with the "beast's" hardware. He even tested several other distributions on it which also "ran great with absolutely zero issues." He did wonder why no Ethernet port and said he didn't love the trackpad, but the keyboard is "fantastic." It has about a four-hour battery life for all its heavy metal and would be great for just about anybody. Lunduke concluded that the $2200 price tag was well worth it.
In a brief teaser today, Clement Lefebvre said that Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 just passed QA and got approved for a Release Candidate release. He said an official announcement would be forthcoming in the next "couple of days." LMDE adopted a frozen release cycle in February to promote stability after being introduced as a rolling-release distro.
Elsewhere:
* KaOS 2015.02 Review: Delivers a Pure KDE Plasma 5.0 Desktop
* Thoughts on using Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition 17.1
* Bodhi Linux 3.0.0 Review: Minimalist distro with superb performance
* First Impressions of Ubuntu MATE 14.10
* Building a pre-release Linux testbed with openSuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, and more