Today in Open Source: Ballmer retires from Microsoft, Linux users weep. Plus: How to find the best Linux distro, and the fifty best Linux distros! Steve Ballmer Retires: A Dark Day for Linux! Just a quick note about Steve Ballmer. As you may have heard, he’ll be retiring from his job as CEO of Microsoft soon. This is a dark day for Linux, my friends. Ballmer has unwittingly been a true friend to Linux during his long reign of errors at Microsoft. Ballmer has my utmost gratitude for his help in growing the Linux user base over the years. Windows 8, in particular, has gotten many Windows users to take another look at Linux. It would have been better for Linux if Ballmer had stayed a few more years, to complete the utter destruction of Microsoft. Still, we should be grateful for what we’ve gotten out of him. Hopefully it will take Microsoft’s board longer to find another CEO, and we can savor another two years of Ballmer continuing to lead Microsoft into the abyss. Behold Ballmer, in all his glory, in this inspiring video! See the chart at the Zero Hedge article below to fully appreciate the legacy of Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. It has been a wild ride for Steve Ballmer since he became Microsoft CEO in January 2000. A market-cap loss of over $330 billion is hardly the legacy he would want to have left but it is perhaps the $24 billion spike in market cap that has occurred today since his resignation that will have him leaving before the 12 months are up… More at Zero Hedge Find the Best Linux Distro for Your Computing Needs SJVN has an excellent article here on ITworld about how to find the Linux distro that best suits your computing needs. He’s broken down choices into five different kinds of users, and recommended a distro for each. If I, who’ve made something of a career of tracking Linux, can’t keep up with all the distros how can you? Honestly, you can’t. No one can. So how can you find the right Linux for you? This handy, dandy guide will help. More at ITworld I absolutely agree with Steven that you need to know what you want before choosing a Linux distro. Otherwise you may spend a lot of time spinning your wheels and floating from distro to distro. Distrohopping is actually great fun, but it can be annoying if you aren’t doing it deliberately, and you’re stuck running from one distro to another without finding what you want. That said, I do have a few disagreements with Steven about his choices. I’ve broken this down into the same sections Steven has in his article, but I’ve offered my own recommendations instead. 1. Steven picked Chrome OS as the web-centric distro, but I think Peppermint OS should be considered as an alternative. You can still use all of Google’s services, but you also get the Ubuntu base and you have the option of installing lots of local applications as well. 2. For the second choice, a distro for someone that didn’t want to learn much about Linux, Steven picked Ubuntu. There’s nothing wrong with Ubuntu, but Unity itself can be a big turnoff for some people. If you’re one of those people, one of the versions of Linux Mint might be a better fit for you. There are different flavors of Linux Mint, including Debian, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, and Xfce. 3. I have no quibbles with Steven’s third choice, a distro for someone switching from Windows to Linux, Linux Mint would serve very well in that situation too. 4. Steven’s fourth choice of Fedora, for a user that wants “pure, hard” Linux was less attractive to me. Fedora is a fine distro and it certainly has its place for developers, but Debian might also be a good choice for those looking for a “pure” linux but who might not be developers. 5. The last section concerned KDE based distros. Steven’s suggestions were good, but we might as well throw in the KDE version of Linux Mint too. Yeah, I know I sound like a broken record about Linux Mint. But the KDE version is quite good and should be considered by anyone needing a KDE based desktop. I have one last suggestion to add to this list for anyone who wants a distro that contains only free software. Take a look at Trisquel. It doesn’t get much press, but it’s a very good distro in its own right, and it doesn’t contain proprietary software. I did review of Trisquel 6.0 for Desktop Linux Reviews back in April, and found it to be a great choice for some users. The Top Fifty Linux Distros Speaking of Linux distros, EFY Times has a list of the top fifty Linux distros. The list is broken down into the following categories: Major Distributions Distros Based on Ubuntu Distros Based on Debian Distros Based on Slackware Distros Based on Arch Linux Distros Based on Cloud Computing Distros Based on Mandriva Lightweight Distros Windows-Like Distros Other Distros We bring to you a list of 50 most popular Linux OS are stated below. The list has been arranged on the basis of major distributions that include distributions for Ubuntu, Debian, Red/Hat Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, Arch and Gentoo, distributions for cloud computing, light weight distributions, distributions for cloud computing and finally those that are a misfit in any category. More at EFY Times Overall, I think it’s a pretty good list. It gives some basic details about each distro, though I think it would have been better if links to the home pages of each distro had been included to make it easier to get more information. The list works well if you’re wondering what some of the basic differences are between so many different distros. Plus, it has some distro spins that you might never have heard of before. One minor quibble about this article, it would be great if the editors bolded the categories within the article. You have to look closely to see the category titles, and that’s never a good thing. Readers should be able to move from section to section or scan the article page to find the category that interests them. Open Source