Community

Gender bias affects contributions to the open source community, according to a paper published Monday. Female programmers' suggestions for code changes in open source projects -- called "pull requests" -- were accepted more often than those of their male counterparts when gender was unspecified. How...

Even if you're a newcomer to Linux, you've probably figured out that it is not a single, monolithic operating system, but a constellation of projects. The different "stars" in this constellation take the form of "distributions," or "distros." Each offers its own take on the Linux model. To gain an a...

A new strain of malware targeting Linux systems, dubbed "Linux/Shishiga," could morph into a dangerous security threat. Eset on Tuesday disclosed the threat, which represents a new Lua family unrelated to previously seen LuaBot malware. Linux/Shishiga uses four different protocols -- SSH, Telnet, HT...

"What can it do that Windows can't?" That is the first question many people ask when considering Linux for their desktop. To a degree, that depends on whether you choose a desktop environment or a window manager. If you want a desktop experience that is lightning fast and uncompromisingly efficient,...

Docker this week introduced two new projects at DockerCon with an eye to helping operating system vendors, software creators and in-house tinkerers create container-native OSes and container-based systems. The projects are based on a new model for cross-ecosystem collaboration and the advancement of...

The ability to run Android apps natively in a Linux desktop environment is a step closer to realization, thanks to Anbox, a new open source project. Simon Fels, who is the lead software engineer at Canonical, last week debuted a pre-alpha release of the Anbox platform, which he has been working on i...

Canonical's long and winding quest for a unified user experience came to a sudden halt on Wednesday, as founder Mark Shuttleworth announced the firm's decision to stop investing in its struggling Unity8 shell and revert to Gnome for its Ubuntu 18.04 LTS desktop OS release.

Who's afraid of the Linux terminal? Not you, if you've learned the basics of navigating your system. But how will these newly acquired skills help improve your computing life? To give you a sense of the terminal's everyday usefulness, here are some examples of tasks the terminal is well-disposed to ...

In a move that caps off its gradual embrace of open source in a bear hug, Microsoft last week announced that it would shutter its nearly 11-year-old CodePlex project site and migrate its library of work to GitHub. Microsoft has invested in Visual Studio Team Services as its "One Engineering Project"...

The Cloud Foundry Foundation has announced the launch of a worldwide cloud-native developer certification initiative. The foundation created the program to fill the widening gap of trained programmers for cloud apps and services. The Linux Foundation -- which has trained and certified more developer...

The new OS is designed to improve on battery life and interactive performance of devices, according to Dave Burke, vice president of engineering (Android) at Google.

If you've begun to tinker with your desktop Linux terminal, you may be ready to take a deeper dive. You're no longer put off by references to "terminal," "command line" or "shell," and you have a grasp of how files are organized. You can distinguish between a command, an option and an argument. You'...

Google on Thursday announced Guetzli, a new contribution to its evolving set of tools for the open source community. Guetzli is an encoder that allows JPEG files to be compressed as much as 35 percent, resulting in much faster Web page loading. "Guetzli," which means "cookie" in Swiss German, allows...