Celebrating Seven Years Of Phoronix

On Sunday, the 5th of June, Phoronix.com will be turning seven years old. Here is to an early happy birthday for Phoronix, a look back, and what is coming up.

I had founded Phoronix.com on 5 June, 2004 after being dissatisfied with the state of Linux hardware support at the time. There was too much uncertainty back then whether or not a given component would work with Linux. It was the pre-Ubuntu days when Fedora Core was in its youth, Mandrake was great and living strong, there was still much hope for seeing "the year of the Linux desktop", and there were many great niche distributions that offered more than simple media rebranding and facade changes.

While Linux hardware support has improved a lot over the past seven years, it's still not ideal and there's a lot left to be achieved when it comes to Linux hardware enablement for new products, reaching a feature parity on Linux hardware drivers to Windows, and so many other caveats that remain.

Linux news and media can still be improved as well and become better enriched. But during a time in which various other Linux-focused sites have fallen, such as LinuxHardware.org, NewsForge, KernelTrap, Phoronix has remained. In seven years now there has been over 1,800 featured articles and more than 4,500 original news postings. Of the 1,800+ articles, there's been more than 360 articles relating to Linux display drivers, more than 100 graphics card reviews, nearly 100 motherboard reviews, lots of content concerning Linux gaming, and plenty of other Linux hardware reviews. Most of these articles have been exclusive content not available elsewhere along with dozens (or hundreds) of breaking news items.

With the Phoronix Forums, which launched later in 2006, there is now over 42,000 members and more than 173,000 posts.

Also on Sunday will mark the three-year anniversary of the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0-Trondheim. The Phoronix Test Suite alone has been a monumental feat for Linux and it will continue to grow in importance. Most recently, the growth of OpenBenchmarking.org has been phenomenal as well and continues breaching new milestones. There have been more than 290,000 benchmarks, 87,000 systems, and data on more than 653,000 computer component configurations. Nevertheless, the best is yet to come. Going forward, the Phoronix Test Suite stack is being spun out of the Phoronix Media umbrella, there are many new features coming down the pipe, and new territories to explore.

Improvements to Phoronix.com are also out on the horizon. As brought up last week, I am currently seeking suggestions and areas for improvement for the site. Lots of the feedback though has just been pipe dreams with most still not realizing that nearly all of the Phoronix work just rests on my shoulders. [Or the Phoronix Test Suite, Augustiner, and I.] There have been acquisition talks to change this issue, but nothing has yet materialized. Many hardware vendors and PR/marketing agencies are also still not fully committed to Linux, making many of the reader requests unachievable. Regardless, your feedback is always appreciated as we strive to enrich the Linux hardware experience.

In celebration of Phoronix turning seven years old, there is a Unigine game giveaway being run through next week. You can also do Phoronix a favor by white-listing the site from AdBlock, becoming a Phoronix Premium subscriber, use our affiliate shopping links, or make a PayPal tip. Here is to another great year at Phoronix!

Michael Larabel
@MichaelLarabel / @Phoronix
Founder of Phoronix