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The 2008 Linux and Free Software Timeline

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the year-in-review dept.

diegocgteleline.es writes "Here is LWN's eleventh annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year. As always, 2008 proved to be an interesting year, with great progress in useful software that made our systems better. Of course, there were some of the usual conflicts — patent woes, project politics, and arguments over freedom — but overall, the pace of free software progress stayed on its upwardly increasing trend. 2008 was a year that saw the end of SCO — or not — the rise of Linux-based 'netbooks,' multiple excellent distribution releases, more phones and embedded devices based on Linux, as well as major releases of software we will be using for years (X.org, Python, KDE, ...)."

3 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Significant events that did not happen for Linux by sundarvenkata · · Score: 1, Troll

    1) Unified API for interacting with the umpteen number of desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, Englightenment, ad nauseam. 2) Decent voice chat clients (no please do not tell me Skype Beta works in your *picked for linux* hardware) 3) Unified package management system. 4) Decent IDE for Python that does not suck balls (Anjuta, Pydev do not cut it). 5) Google Chrome 6) Default system fonts that do not make you puke.

  2. Re:2009 by michrech · · Score: -1, Troll

    Except, of course, for all the printers that wouldn't work, web cameras, and who knows what other hardware. Also, all the software people currently have/own also will not work (and a good majority of it does not have a linux equivalent). Games, of course, being the best software example.

    When I can play DDO in a native linux client, I'll possibly switch. When I can play DDO, AOE3 (plus the two expansions), Rise of Legends, Universe at War, and a few others natively in Linux, I most certainly will switch.

    If you were to go merely by looks, Windows 7 is now practically identical to KDE4 interface. In fact they are so frightfully similar, you'd get the impression that they have same GUI developers.

    On the positive side, if they looked alike, people would have no problem transitioning to the *nix+KDE side

    --
    bork bork bork!
  3. Re:most exciting thing for me: Wine 1.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Wine... virtually every single thing I've ever tried in wine (over the space of about 4 years and several different PCs and distros) ends like this:

    wine: Unhandled page fault on write access to 0x000b0000 at address 0x52cb42 (thread 0009), starting debugger...

    Or slight variants thereof... it's practically useless.