Happy 5th Birthday, Phoronix!

It was five years ago today, on the 5th of June 2004, that Phoronix.com launched. It was also one year ago to the day that Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 was released. Here are a few statistics and highlights from the past five years with what we have set out to accomplish with enriching the Linux hardware experience and driving Linux-based benchmarking and testing.

Over the past five years, we have written more than 2,300 news items and about 1,500 feature articles. A listing of most of the articles can be found on this page with more than 260 articles just about Linux graphics card drivers, over 200 software articles, over 80 distinct motherboard tests, and hundreds of other articles on topics surrounding Linux hardware -- primarily product reviews. Our publishing frequency has increased greatly in the past two years, and even with our incredibly small staff, these numbers should keep climbing.

Among our most popular articles have been Ubuntu: 32-bit v. 64-bit Performance, Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 Benchmarks, ASUS Motherboard Ships With Embedded Linux, Web Browser, Ubuntu 7.10 + WINE vs. Windows XP, The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux, and Wayland: A New X Server For Linux.

Some of our most popular news stories of all time include AMD Releases 900+ Pages Of GPU Specs, Dell Wants Better ATI Linux Drivers, AMD: GPU Specifications Without NDAs!, The Degrading Quality Of X.Org Releases?, and Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid's Theme. Yes, quite a few ATI/AMD Linux news events have been announced at Phoronix over the years such as their brand new Catalyst Linux driver, their open-source strategy, the RadeonHD Linux driver, their evolutionary leap in Linux support, and all of their documentation drops and milestones.

On the Phoronix Forums, which launched just three years ago, there are over 72,000 posts and around 20,000 members. The most replied to thread ever has been the wish list for porting projects to Linux, which has resulted in a great deal of good for Linux gamers. The most viewed thread on our forums has been AMD 8.42.3 Driver Released -- The Baby Is Born!.

Besides Phoronix itself, Phoronix Media has launched several other (mostly technology related) web properties over the past few years like Phorogit, RadeonHD.org, Cekora, Trondheim Photos, and Open The Blob. Phoronix Media is also preparing to launch web properties in other niche markets (with the first of these coming just weeks away) and possibly other languages too. What has also become a staple to Phoronix is the Phoronix Test Suite, which first emerged from our testing labs just over a year ago and since then has matured a great deal. There are over 100 test profiles in this open-source benchmarking software that has been adopted by major OEM companies, government organizations, Linux shops, and others looking to validate their software and/or hardware under Linux. With Phoronix Global and other features it also has become quite popular with enthusiasts and others while also being available within Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and other Linux distributions (along with OpenSolaris, BSD, and Mac OS X!).

Within the next two months Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 will be released to take our testing/benchmarking software to the next level. In Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 "Sandtorg" there is an official GTK2 GUI, a remote test management system called Phoromatic, new testing capabilities, new user options, and plenty of other features. In tandem we will also be launching PTS Linux Live, which is a Linux LiveDVD/USB distribution designed for benchmarking, hardware testing, and performance monitoring. As we previously detailed in Driving Linux-based Benchmarking With Sandtorg, PTS Linux Live will be optimized for use on the latest and greatest hardware and will closely follow the upstream developments of the key Linux packages that it is reliant upon. We are confident that Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 will be a great release, but over the next year, there should be many more major announcements to come that will further transform the standards for Linux-based software and hardware testing.

Well, here is to another great year! Be sure to follow us via RSS, Twitter, or find us on Facebook so that you can stay up to date with all of our Linux hardware reviews, performance testing, and Linux news. Special thanks go out to those that have supported us over the years and our advertisers, along with those that have made a donation and subscribed to Phoronix Premium.