Phoronix Turns 13, Phoronix Test Suite Is Now 9: Happy Birthday

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 5 June 2017 at 12:00 AM EDT. 20 Comments
PHORONIX
Phoronix is now officially a teenager, with it marking 13 years since I founded Phoronix.com. Today also marks nine years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0-Trondheim for advancing open-source benchmarking.

Damn, it's been a journey thus far from when Linux hardware support was in the gutter, ATI (then AMD) graphics were extremely notorious among Linux users, USB mice could be a problem at times, configuring new graphics drivers were a royal pain, Lindows was recently settled with Microsoft, and Ubuntu was soon to launch... Now in 2017, the open-source AMD graphics driver stack is as competitive with its binary driver and roughly on-par with the NVIDIA Linux driver, Linux hardware support continues to be roughly something that can be expected of most major hardware on day-one, and the support continues to only get better. But there are also letdowns like the neglected state of SteamOS / Steam Machines, many hardware vendors continuing to be disinterested in Linux (and for some vendors, actually less interest than in 2004~2006 when frankly their PR/media folks seemed to have more potential in Linux for gaining desktop market-share), Ubuntu Unity 8 / Convergence / Mir not coming to reality, etc.

It's been an interesting ride watching the Linux hardware landscape evolve over the past 13 years. Especially it's been interesting in seeing the adoption of the Phoronix Test Suite over the past 9 years, which is now used by a majority of major corporations, research institutes / universities, and more while being open-source and delivering benchmarking automation not readily or freely available on Windows.

I wish I could say it's all been great the past 13 years, but sadly, with each year it rather becomes more challenging in large part due to the increasing numbers of ad-blockers viewing Phoronix, OpenBenchmarking.org, etc. Such a large number of ad-blockers has continued to adversely affect the ability to continually covering the landscape -- working 365 days per year and not taking a single day off since 2013, not only for a love of the work but in making ends meet. The lack of resources has also led to unfortunately not being able to hire more hands (such as the great intern work done by Eric in the past), not being able to buy some hardware components when not provided by the manufacturer, rarely covering conferences in-person these days, etc. Pay-per-impression (not click) advertisements are the primary means of making Phoronix work.

With that said, if you are an ad-blocker or just wishing to support all of this work done over the past 13 years and counting, please consider going premium where you can enjoy the site ad-free, view featured multi-page articles on a single page, provide priority feedback, and much more all while allowing this site to continue to function. In celebration of Phoronix's birthday, there's a special deal for you where for little more than $2 per month (or $100 for a lifetime subscription, which would have already made itself a minimal investment based upon my past work), can be had for a limited time. Bitcoin, PayPal, and now Google Wallet are among the forms accepted. Tips are also accepted via any of the payment methods or at least please don't view an ad-blocker on this site and/or share our content on social media.

Looking forward to the year ahead, Ubuntu with its desktop focus shifted to GNOME and Wayland should be interesting to watch, the open-source AMD and Intel driver stack continues getting better by the way, NVIDIA's proprietary driver remains on-par with their Windows offering, and there continues being lots of innovation by smaller distributions like Solus / Clear Linux / Void Linux / Arch and others. I'll be back with more articles in the morning. As of writing, on Phoronix in the past 13 years has been 21,773 news articles and 3,538 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews.

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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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