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• Desktop Porn

  
  
  Fri Aug 22

• Propaganda

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  Protect your freedom!

  
  
  
  

• Small print in big fat letters

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

  ---

Congratulations to us all! Debian turns 15 today. How time flies when you’re having fun!

I like how EFYtimes puts it:

Despite being only 15 years old, Debian is more mature than any of the other operating systems.

I’ll drink to that! It’s a huge exaggeration but still, we have a solid foudation to build our freedom on.

Our desktops still rely on many very old technologies and ideas. Motif is not even a very old tookit if you look at the age of the whole WIMP metaphor (windows, icons, menus, pointer). As Pici, genii and TiredWolf reminded us today, this is in fact true of most, if not all technology.

Working on my dissertation, I was going through my field notes again today. I came across this snippet from my IRC logs, concerning the high-level design of the GNOME desktop.

<Amaranth> An option where two people disagree on how something will work? Not gnome
<Amaranth> Automatically figuring out what to do based on the circumstances? Gnome

‘Nuff said. Should apply to any user-facing software.

But yes, even after this Zen moment, I’m still writing the book. =)

Sometimes it’s good to give your friends some time to work on their ideas. mc44 totally appreciates wobblywu’s hard work. This is how communities work at best.

Today, the Finnish Linux User Group[1] announced their yearly Linux Contributor Award. The Winner: Ubuntu Suomi! Translating from the press release (Finnish PDF).

The volunteer community has taken care of translations, arranged events around the country, promoted Linux and Free Software to legislators and, above all, provided user support through its web forum.

Mirv accepting the prize.
(Photo from the ubuntu-fi blog)

Congratulations to our most excellent LoCo Team!

Two honorable mentions were awarded as well. One was given to the Linux.fi wiki. The choice further emphasizes the great importance that peer-provided support and documentation has for the success of Free Software. The other one went to Monty Widenius, the founder of MySQL. Yes, in case you didn’t know, he is yet another Finn helping build the tools for our road to software freedom. :) Altough MySQL is not directly related to LInux, as one of the pillars of the near-ubiqutuous LAMP stack, its success is very much tied to that of Linux.

Cheers to these Honored Ones too!

[1] Yes, there is only one. It is a small country :)

This morning, I found an email from Karol in my inbox, telling me about a promotional Ubuntu website he designed. It is slick!

The site is a place for Ubuntu users to share their story. Why do you use Ubuntu? Tell your story about security, stability, desktop sexiness and all the other reasons to choose our favorite Linux distribution for your daily business and pleasure use!

We all know why GNOME is the most popular desktop in the enterprise. It does so much for users — they don’t have to do a thing while the GNOME daemons get things done. topyli and mc44 were trying to convince aubade of the benefits today.

I think it was a pretty noble effort anyway.

OpenOffice.org has released version 2.4 with many improvements. Congratulations to both developers and users of OO.o! I personally am in no capacity to evaluate it. I’m pretty sure it has about as many buttons and check boxes and sliders as the previous one. I still like Abiword.

The new OpenOffice.org website looks awesome though, double cheers for the clean and usable design!

Inspired by this, and also probably about my previous post, my friends nickspoon and mc44 on #ubuntu-offtopic defined a topyli-friendly design for OpenOffice.org 3.0. There’s still time to make a difference before they feature freeze!

But as mc44 says, don’t get your hopes too high :(

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