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Credit: Pascal Volk
Bye, Felicia
In many ways, I can’t wait to kiss 2016 goodbye. It’s been full of bad news, including the passing of greats like Muhamed Ali, David Bowie, and John Glen. There’s been a rash ofhigh-profile security breaches. There’s an ongoing crisis in the Middle East. And let’s not even talk about the election that doesn’t seem to want to go away.
Despite myriad signs of the world’s madness, the year has actually been pretty good for linux and open-source. There have been some big releases and announcements, andWorld Beyond windowswas there to cover them. Here’s a look back at the biggest stories from the year.
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Credit: James Niccolai
What the shell?
Microsoft has long been the adversary and evil empire in the eyes of the Linux community, but gone are the days of Steve Ballmer. While Windows is hardly on the brink of becoming an open-source project, Microsoft made big overtures to open-source this year.
Microsoft partnered with Canonical to create the Windows Subsystem for Linux , a translation layer that converts Linux signals into signals for the Windows kernel (a sort of reverse-WINE). Microsoft and Canonical showed this off with the release of a Bourne Again Shell (bash) for Windows . Microsoft upped the ante more by making its Power-Shell open-source , and making it available on Linux and Mac as well.
And finally, Microsoft officially joined the Linux Foundation , something that nobody would have predicted back in 2003. By joining the Linux Foundation, Microsoft is giving money to Linux kernel development, but it’s not clear how (or if) Microsoft will make efforts to improve the Linux desktop experience.
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Credit: The Fedora Project
Desktops keep getting better
Life wasn’t easy for the GNOME 3 desktop environment when it was first released. It was buggy, a bit sluggish, and (the worst part) new and different.
If you haven’t tried GNOME 3 in a while, it’s time to give it another go. GNOME hit version 3.20 back in March , and is up to 3.22 now. Some big improvements include support for Flatpak packages, enhanced desktop polish, and improved support for the Wayland display management system.
KDE also continued the version march with the releases ofPlasma 5.6, 5.7, and 5.8. With 5.7 and 5.8, KDE has greatly improved Wayland support.
With both GNOME and KDE offering solid support for Wayland, the aging X Window System may begin to fade.
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The year of the fox
It was a big year for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, and 2016 held mostly good news for the flaming canid.
In February, Mozilla began thawing its relationship with the Debian project. (Ubuntu is based on Debian.) Due to a licensing conflict concerning logos and branding, Debian had been redistributing Firefox as Iceweasel since 2004. A recent change in how Mozilla licenses the Firefox branding and trademark is allowing Debian to distribute the browser (and other Mozilla applications) using its true name.
Firefox for Linux finally got a security update for Adobe Flash . Though Mozilla has been trying to push html5 video standards for some time, some websites still stubbornly require the plugin.
Firefox also announced that it would support digital rights management (DRM) encrypted media . While this was an undertandably controversial move to some in the free and open-source software community (many of whom decry DRM as evil), it ultimately allows users to watch Amazon Prime Video and Netflix without the workarounds needed to install Microsoft Silverlight and other plugins.
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Skype adds support for Chromebooks and Linux
One thing that has driven me crazy about Skype was that for a long time, the Linux client was old and outdated , and didn’t scale well with hiDPI displays. Microsoft went ahead and fixed that by developing a web-based Skype client that allows Chromebooks and Linux users to make calls .The client works equally well in Chrome (Chromium) and Firefox for Linux.
In addition to the new application, Microsoft released a new