Today in Open Source: Your first Linux distro? Plus: Mark Shuttleworth an asset to desktop Linux? WordPress 3.6 is out! Your First Linux Distro? Foss Force has the results of a poll of their readers that asked about their first Linux distro. Wow. Talk about taking me back a long, long time! I haven’t thought about how I got started with Linux for ages. Your answers also showed us just how diverse the readership here is. Not only did we see a lot of you offering up the usual suspects, such as Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora, we also got reminders of Linux’s rich history. It was somewhat gratifying to discover that some who visit here first tried Linux using long gone but not forgotten distros such as Yggdrasil and Soft Landing System. More at Foss Force As far as I can recall, my first distro was SUSE. I remember buying it in a box, and installing it on my computer. Yes, I actually bought it on a disc rather than downloading it. I don’t think I had a disc burner back then, so that may have had something to do with it. Plus, I think I wanted to support it by giving the developers some money for their product. That’s still a good idea. If you use a distro and there’s a “donation” link somewhere on the site, drop the developers a few bucks to help support your favorite distro. It was always exciting to get a new version of SUSE. I liked reading about the new features, and I’d spend hours poking around with it to see what I liked and what I didn’t. Looking back at it, I was a distro reviewer just waiting to be born! Heh, heh. So tell me in the comments about your first distro, are you still using it? Or have you moved on to something else? Mark Shuttleworth and Desktop Linux Speaking of Foss Force, there’s another article about why Mark Shuttleworth is important to the development and success of desktop Linux. I mostly agree with the sentiments of the article, Ubuntu is an asset to the desktop Linux community. It offers a relatively easy way into desktop Linux, while offering a lot of “fit and finish” to impress new users. I don’t like Ubuntu. I won’t use it. It’s way too mainstream for this old hippie. But that’s just my personal preference. In truth, it’s a damn fine operating system, maybe the best consumer oriented OS to come out of Linux ever. I use Bodhi, which is built on Ubuntu, a fact that was almost a deal breaker for me. Since I’ve become a Bodhi user, however, I’ve become very impressed with the “Ubuntu inside.” Bodhi is a much better distro than it ever could be if it didn’t have Ubuntu DNA. Shuttleworth, you see, seems to understand fit and finish. More at Foss Force Yes, I know that many hate Ubuntu because of Unity or whatever. But Ubuntu tends to be more well known among non-Linux users. So I consider it a “gateway distro” that brings new users into the desktop Linux community. Ubuntu may be where a new Linux user starts, but often it’s not where they end up. Some Ubuntu users will move on to Linux Mint, Debian, etc. So ultimately Ubuntu is an important asset to grow the desktop Linux community over time. WordPress 3.6 Released WordPress 3.6 is finally out. My own blogs run on WordPress, it’s a great tool. I’ll be updating them to 3.6 when I can carve out some time to do it. WordPress 3.6 was pushed to the public yesterday after having been available as beta and release candidate versions for a while. The WordPress team calls it an enhancement and bug-fix release so that it is less likely that you will run into any issues updating your blog to version 3.6. More at Ghacks Here’s a list of WordPress 3.6 highlights, see the release announcement for a much longer list of features. New Default Theme – Twenty Thirteen Focus on blogging Single column layout with Sidebar / Widgets in the footer Latest Theme Features support, particularly Post Formats Font-based icons (Genericons) Admin Enhancements Menus UI improvements Revisions revised to be more dynamic and scalable Autosave and Post Locking Preview Audio and Video on Media Edit Screen In-line login following expired sessions For Developers External Libraries have been updated. More Info New audio/video APIs give developers access to powerful media metadata, like ID3 tags. Filters for revisions, allowing you to set the number of revisions ad hoc instead of only via a define. More Info Semantic Markup allows themes to chose improved HTML5 markup for comment forms, search forms, and comment lists. Search content for shortcodes with has_shortcode() and adjust shortcode attributes with a new filter. Open Source