linux

The cat is out of the bag and Steve Ballmer’s worst nightmare has just come true. Microsoft, once the most outspoken enemy of Linux and open source software, not only loves it but may have just become dependent on it. Its cloud computing platform Azure has long offered customers the choice between Linux and Windows virtual machines.

Now a Microsoft engineer has just admitted that Azure customers have preferred using Linux instead of Windows servers. But what is a clear win for Linux in this market could also negatively affect other aspects of the operating system, most especially “The Linux Desktop” everyone loves talking about.

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Android has the lion's share of the smartphone market partly because of the wide variety of devices available and the wide range of prices they carry. There may also be one other factor influencing those numbers: early obsolescence of devices. Android phones are guaranteed two to three years of software updates and that is if they're lucky. If you have a five-year-old or older phone that's still working, you can only hope there's an Android ROM for that or, if you're more adventurous, support from Linux-based postmarketOS.

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Due in part to the feedback given to the group over the weekend and because of their connections with Valve, Canonical did an about-face today. They've suggested that feedback from gamers, Ubuntu Studio, and the WINE community led them to change their plan and will "build selected 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS. Whether this will change Valve's future with Ubuntu Steam, we'll see.

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The majority of the time that Linux gets dragged in the spotlight is when there are high-profile security bugs that remind people how Linux practically runs the world behind the scenes. This time, however, the controversy is ironically around one of the operating system's weakest points: gaming. A Valve developer just "announced" on Twitter that the company will be dropping support for future releases of Ubuntu and, as expected, it has driven Linux users into a slight frenzied panic.

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With the focus given to Huawei's US ban, there has also been some discussion about Android, Google's hold on the platform, and truly free (as in freedom) alternatives to the world's biggest mobile OS. There has never been a shortage of alternative mobile platforms, many of them revolving around Linux, but there has been a dearth of companies making devices that run and support such platforms. Pine64 is one of those few and it is now sharing some development in its quest to make a privacy-respecting open source smartphone.

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Microsoft Windows is the most used operating system in the world, at least when talking about desktop and laptop computers. In addition to the usual consumer and enterprise customers, it is also used in government offices and computers. That may have been the status quo but more and more governments are looking to other solutions for one reason or another. The latest to start that journey is South Korea, whose government is planning to migrate its computers to the open source operating system Linux.

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There's a flaw in the vast majority of Intel chips from here back to the year 2011 called ZombieLoad. That's what security researchers are calling it, anyway. The name refers to data a processor cannot handle, a "zombie load" which can be exploited thanks to a code vulnerability in Intel hardware.

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Gone are the days when Chrome OS felt simply like a glorified web browser limited to Google's apps and services. Google says it designed the platform around speed, simplicity, and security but, to be honest, only two of those probably still hold. Chrome OS has grown up to be quite the complicated beast and now Google is revealing what it was all for: Web and Android app development.

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Nintendo dislikes emulators. Except for the ones it uses and ships itself, that is. It also dislikes people hacking into its consoles to make them do things the gaming giant could have never imagined nor permitted. Those two don'ts, however, have collided on the Nintendo Switch, as hacker and modder Voxel9 demonstrated the handheld gaming console running an Xbox game played with a PlayStation controller via an emulator running on the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Let that sink in for a while.

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Google has been promoting Chrome OS and Chromebooks as the platform to use to get real work done but even its fans will admit it's not there yet. Juggling three platforms in one probably isn't easy so when Google does make strides in all of them, there's reason for Chrome OS users to celebrate. The latest major release, version 74, won't immediately make it the OS to finally beat Windows and macOS but at least now it can be more useful especially for Linux users.

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Samsung's latest flagships are so powerful you could almost use them as a portable PC. Actually, you already can if you don't mind running Android in Samsung's special DeX mode. But if you really wanted desktop applications, you're mostly out of luck. Not unless you're comfortable using Linux via Samsung's still beta Linux on DeX. Fortunately, the company is now expanding support of that platform to its latest flagship smartphones and, surprisingly, its mid-range tablet as well.

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Linux runs the computing world. It is by far the most used operating system on servers and perhaps the only OS on supercomputers. It has taken over much of the mobile world thanks to Android and is on the cusp of taking a majority share in education via Chrome OS.

The one area where it has had difficulty expanding year after year is the desktop. Not because it's terrible at it but because it needs a few missing pieces that will stop the Year of the Linux desktop from being a running joke.

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