Why Mint's Not Best, Tumbling Tumbleweed, Fedora Elections

It's that time of year again when all good blue hatters rush to the virtual polls to vote for their trusted leaders. The 2017 January Fedora elections are in full swing and Fedora account holders are urge to vote in the three categories this term. Elsewhere, Scott Gilbertson felt the need to explain his best distribution of the year choice and Douglas DeMaio is back from holiday with a report from Tumbleweed development. M.Hanny Sabbagh summarized Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical today and VAR Guy contributor Christopher Tozzi concluded that the lines between Windows and Linux are blurring. Cynthia Harvey points out areas in everyday life that are already run by artificial intelligence and a cookie campaign convinced developers to bring Civilization 6 to Linux.

Elections at Fedora happen every six months to replace outgoing members. This time around elections include posts for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee, and Fedora Council. Voting has already begun and those eligible to vote will have until next Monday, January 16 to get their votes counted. Lots of candidate are running and several familiar names appear on the ballot. Many have been featured in interviews at the Fedora Community Blog in the last month or so and a blog post today listed them all in one convenient location. To be eligible to vote for the Council, one must have a contributor license agreement on file in the Fedora Account System. The other two require a CLA and inclusion in one other non-CLA group (like Ambassador or designer). The winners will be announced January 17.

Scott Gilbertson chose Fedora 25 as his pick for best distro of 2016 and he said today that he knew he was going to catch flies from the Linux Mint folks. Apparently he did and he felt he needed to address his decision. He spent a lot of time reviewing the latest Mint in this same article and said it was nice but one can tell it's based of an older Ubuntu (LTS notwithstanding). He also took issue with the update app and he said that's too important to overlook. "In the end, Mint 18.1 lacks any compelling, must-have updates, and the disappointing defaults for the Update Manager would stop me from installing Mint for anyone but experienced users." After all the Mint pros and cons, Gilbertson said he denied Mint the honor of being christened the best simply because of one word.

Douglas DeMaio today posted of the latest updates to Tumbleweed. The last snapshot of 2016 featured Linux 4.9. The first of the year brought KDE app updates, new Thunderbird, and new Nano update. The 20170109 snapshot cleaned up Mesa configurations for more consistency across archs and improved Btrfsprog system snapshot handling. Snapshot 20170110 was released today as well. It brought another Mesa version update as well as YaST improvements and lots of fixes in Cairo's version update. Rolling along with the tumbling tumbleweed...

In other news:

* Civilization 6 Confirmed For Linux

* Insights on Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical

* Artificial Intelligence Examples: 20 AI Shaping Your Life

* Windows is starting to look a lot like Linux -- and vice versa