What's Popular In The Linux World This Year

Here's a look at some of the most popular Linux news stories from this year to date.

Now being in Orlando for the UDS-P summit, but with the event not officially getting underway until Monday (beginning with Mark's keynote where something will be announced), there's time to catch up on a few things (especially as the beer is crap and the weather is less than ideal for VFR flight at the moment). In deciding what to write about next, I was looking at the most popular Phoronix stories from this calendar year.

For those interested in what the most popular Phoronix news stories were in the past ten months, they are listed below in order of popularity. Along with each popular Linux news item is a small redux.

Say Hello To Linux 3.0; Linus Just Tagged 3.0-rc1 - The Linux 3.0 kernel was released in July and is found in Ubuntu 11.10 among other Linux distributions.

Linus Talks Of Linux 2.8 Or Linux 3.0; Ending Linux 2.6 - Ditto. The Linux 3.1 kernel just recently succeeded the Linux 3.0 release. Linux 3.1 brought mainline support for the OpenRISC architecture, VFS scalability improvements, open-source GPU driver improvements, EXT3 barriers by default, and various other changes. The Linux 3.2 kernel is now what's under active development with some exciting stuff in the queue.

Doom 3 Source-Code To Be Released This Year - All indications are the Doom 3 source-code will be released this calendar year still. id Software's Rage game was released in early October as the premiere title on the id Tech 5 engine. Rage is not expected on Linux until 2012, but it looks like id will be releasing the Doom 3 / id Tech 4 sources in November or early December.

The VirtualBox Kernel Driver Is Tainted Crap - No changes here... On Monday will be some Ubuntu 11.10 benchmarks of Xen, KVM, and VirtualBox virtualization on an Intel Sandy Bridge system against bare metal.

The Challenge In Delivering Open-Source GPU Drivers - It's still a challenge. This article was as a result of Intel's troubling Sandy Bridge launch where there wasn't a pleasant out-of-the-box experience at the time of launch. With Intel's next-generation Ivy Bridge hardware, the Linux support should be in much better shape.

New GIMP Release Has Working Single-Window Mode - GIMP 2.8, which will be the stable version of this GIMP release that presents so many changes, is still not ready. GIMP 2.8 has been delayed repeatedly and right now it's not looking like this open-source image application will be released until H1'2012.

Intel Sandy Bridge Linux Graphics? It's A Challenge - With Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16 the Intel Sandy Bridge support is finally mature. There's been many performance improvements, new features enabled, greater OpenGL support, and more. Intel OSTC developers are now busy gearing up for the release of Ivy Bridge hardware in H1'2012 that should offer some very interesting Linux opportunities.

Linux 2.6.38-rc1 Is Here With Two Features Linus Loves - The Linux 2.6.38 kernel has long since been succeeded.

Open-Source Projects Are Getting Ripped On Amazon - Some of the open-source projects that are being compiled and sold on Amazon (albeit legally for the most part) are still being sold while others are "currently unavailable" according to the Amazon product pages.

AMD Opens Up XvBA! Their Catalyst Linux Video API - The X-Video Bitstream Acceleration API is now more open than it once was, but XvBA is still not nearly as popular as NVIDIA's VDPAU or the cross-driver VA-API implementations. XvBA so far has largely been a flop and there's no indication yet of major changes for the proprietary driver. If/when UVD is finally implemented in the open-source Radeon stack (using UVD), it will probably be for VA-API/VDPAU. The Gallium3D-based implementation already goes for XvMC/VA-API/VDPAU interfaces.

GNOME & KDE Developers Go To Battle Over A Name - The developers continued to battle over the "system settings" name.