7 reasons why I prefer elementary OS Freya over Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn"

When we laid out our featured article on things you need to do after installing Ubuntu 14.10, we shared a few little issues we have had with the latest Ubuntu release. Well things got worse, and I decided to try something else for a change. I've been using elementary OS Freya as my daily driver since then. And I have to say, I'm mighty impressed so far. And the fact that Freya is still very much in beta makes the whole affair all the more interesting. A list of reasons why I prefer elementary OS Freya over Ubuntu 14.10 at the moment.

Don't Use Ubuntu, Use Mint - or elementary

The top story today continued to be the GHOST vulnerability covered last night, probably because the name lends itself to cute headlines - most with a twist on "Ghost in the Machine." But elsewhere, the How-To-Geek said today that new users should stick to Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu. He's not the only one, Tech Drive-in today listed seven reasons he prefers elementary OS over Ubuntu. Despite all that, Michael Larabel today reported on the improved performance of Ubuntu 15.04 on newer machines.

Leftovers: Software

• mpv Is a Media Player with No UI That Runs From Terminal

  mpv, an open source media player that has been forked from mplayer2 and MPlayer and that works only from the command line, has been upgraded to version 0.7.3 and is ready for download.

• unhtml: Peeling away the layers

  unhtml is one of probably two or three (or four or five …) html-strippers that I’ve seen since the start of this silly little site, and while it’s not the most elegant or flexible, it might be the oldest.

• List Of Tools To Monitor The Health Of Your Linux System

  Achieving good performance from a computer or network is an important part of system administration.The monitoring and maintenance of the system is the most important task listed in the checklists for daily tasks of a system and network administrator. There are many commands line utilities created for this purpose.

• Clamping down on users with rbash

  For the first thing, it's an optional feature of bash. It can be included in bash if the --enable-restricted option is used with the configure command when bash is built. To make it usable, you (assuming you're the admin now) create a symbolic link to bash and call is rbash. It's as simple as that. And if you're not sure if a system that you use or administer provides the rbash functionality, try this:

• What is a good command-line IRC client on Linux

  Now replaced more and more by forums, social networks, or mailing lists, IRC was once the method of communication of the web. And if it stands today as the last bastion of hackers and bearded Linux users, it remains one of the fastest and most specific channel of communication. If you have a technical difficulty, or just want some company, there is an appropriate IRC channel for you. And if you are tired of the YouTube comment section and its torrent of hate, IRC people are in general much more behaved (and moderated). So in short, here is a non-exhaustive list of IRC console clients. Why console? Because if you go down there, you might as well do it in style.

• AppStream 0.8 released!

  Yesterday I released version 0.8 of AppStream, the cross-distribution standard for software metadata, that is currently used by GNOME-Software, Muon and Apper in to display rich metadata about applications and other software components.

• AppStream 0.8 Works On Improving Open-Source Software Metadata

• Centreon: A Free Alternative To Nagios Xi Monitoring Platform

• imgflo 0.3: GEGL metaoperations++

  GEGL has for a long time supported meta-operations: operations which are built as a sub-graph of other operations. However, they had to be built programatically using the C API which limited tooling support and the platform-specific nature made them hard to distribute. [...] This makes Flowhub+imgflo a useful tool also outside the web-based processing workflow it is primarily built for. Feature is available in GEGL and GIMP master as of last week, and will be released in GIMP 2.10 / GEGL 0.3.

• Opera Founder Builds a New, Fast and Powerful Browser Called Vivaldi – Gallery

  Vivaldi is a web browser based on Chromium, developed by an Opera founder and his team. They want to provide a browser that is aimed at power users and that makes no compromises regarding its functionality.