The impression you get stepping into most phone carriers' showrooms is that the programmers behind Apple's iOS and Google's Android are driving most of the innovation in smartphones. You'll find few phones on display that run other software systems.

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Also new: Pluses and minuses in Android, iOS rivals Ubuntu, Sailfish, Firefox

Both Mir and Unity 8, (formerly known as Unity Next), are required components for convergence and for Touch apps to run on the desktop. When Canonical's plans for convergence were first announced, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was to use the Mir display server and the Unity 8 shell. With plans for a fully converged Ubuntu now put back to 15.04 or later, the 14.04 release will be sticking with X window server and Unity 7 for the time being.

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Other news about Ubuntu:

My feeling is that the answer is clearly no, and frankly it's very refreshing for Linux gamers to have different options at all. I remember the days when it was very hard to find games for Linux and I'd never want to go back to that. Ever. It was a miserable time if you used Linux and wanted to play games.

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When it comes to mobile operating systems, iOS and Android are still the frontrunners. Despite the brilliant and not-so-brilliant efforts of Microsoft to topple the two giants, the mobile market space is dominated by Cupertino and Mountain View. iOS, which made its beginnings in an era where touch-screen smartphones was a relatively new concept. With the late Steve Jobs at the helm, Apple was instrumental in starting what we now call the smartphone revolution. iOS with its brilliant and shiny design wowed many users thus catapulting the company into the role of a technology giant. As iOS was soaring at a breathtaking pace, a little-known open-source operating system was making its presence felt ever so slightly. Neither Steve Jobs nor the open-source community could guess how the mobile market space would change in the next few years.

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Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI) Kernel Maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman this week released LTSI-3.10.

This latest version, released on Feb. 24, has brought more than 2,500 additional patches on top of the 3.10 Stable Kernel maintained by the kernel community.

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On 28 January, the UK government asked for public comments on its proposal for standards involved in sharing and working with government documents. Introducing the proposal to use ODF and HTML: "Citizens, businesses and delivery partners, such as charities and voluntary groups, need to be able to interact with government officials, sharing and editing documents. Officials within government departments also need to work efficiently, sharing and collaborating with documents. Users must not have costs imposed upon them due to the format in which editable government information is shared or requested."

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Today's highlights include another silly-names-of-open-source post, this time by Bryan Lunduke. Sam Varghese spoke to Nils Brauckmann, SUSE president, about their latest successes. Nick Heath is reporting of more Munich Open Source migration. WorldofGNOME.org covered a post by Matthias Clasen on Wayland in GNOME and Michael Meeks blogged on his response to the UK Cabinet Office's open standards recommendations.

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By switching to free and open source, the government of the Canary Islands in Spain continues to reduce its ICT costs. The government has already lowered the costs for server and workstation operating systems and other software solutions by 25.4 per cent, reports Roberto Moreno, director of the archipelago's Department for Telecom and New Technologies, and further cost reductions are expected. "The costs went down from 1,006,500 euro per year down to 750,000 euro per year."

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Infraware appears to be counting its chickens before they're hatched. Its Polaris App Generator can turn a lot of Android eggs -- um, apps -- into Tizen apps, but there's not yet a Tizen phone to use them on. At a rumored cost of $5K, the generator might be a good deal for developers once a Tizen phone actually sees the light of day, but it's a big chunk of change to gamble on an as yet unfulfilled promise.

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First of all, we should mention that the GNOME Display Manager 3.12 Beta 1 release brings many code cleanups and fixes several memory leaks that were discovered in previous builds. Second of all, it fixes compilation issues for the FreeBSD operating system and updates numerous translations.

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Black is based on a proprietary security architecture that Boeing calls "PureSecure." Like Samsung’s Knox platform, it has a “trusted boot” mode that can detect and thwart any attempt to root the device—or disable it if it can’t. In addition to onboard media encryption for internal storage, the phone can be configured to inhibit certain functions based on location or the network it is connected to in order to prevent data loss. It might also be used to disable the device’s camera in secure facilities.

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Even Microsoft's Nokia went lower end with new X and X+ phones running a modified Android build and selling for just 89 and 99 euros, respectively. The irony works on many levels here, including the fact that before Nokia went high-end with Windows Phone, it dominated feature phone sales. Nokia phones are still the most commonly seen phones in developing nations.

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One major reason why Ubuntu is sticking with Oracle's MySQL is that Oracle made the effort to get MySQL 5.6 to work properly with Debian and Ubuntu. Yngve Svendsen, Oracle's Director of MySQL Engineering Services, apologized in a blog posting for Oracle's neglect of some Linux distributions in the past. Svendsen wrote, "We closed a gaping hole in our distribution on Linux."

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Epiphany 3.12 Beta 1 revamps the title/location bar, improves the HTML-based overview page, fixes some issues with pop-up windows in multi-process mode, moves the New Tab button to the left side of the navigation toolbar, and repairs the Find toolbar.

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Hi,

I thought I would give an update on what I have been doing.
Some people know that I've been working on porting Glibc and doing some
toolchain work. My evil master plan was to make a Debian port, and today
I'm a happy hacker indeed!

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BARCELONA, Spain -- Mozilla will take over some responsibility for issuing Firefox OS updates that carriers today have, a move that could help users avoid the fate of Android phone owners saddled with older operating system versions.

"We are pushing that envelope," Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich told CNET. "We think we can get people on Wi-Fi upgrading through Mozilla."

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Here are four Chrome extensions that make it easier to read web pages on your Chromebook. These extensions will let you skip making the font sizes of web pages larger to improve readability.

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Found on the company's $135 S5 Android-powered smartphone (not to be confused with Samsung's Galaxy S5), the 5.5-inch handset uses two infrared emitters, a secondary infrared camera to map a 3D image of your facial features.

Setting up the process is simple -- like Android's Face Unlock, the Facial Identification Technology (FIT) feature takes a scan of your face, and then requires you to enter a pin code.

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The official release of Qt 5.3 is tentatively planned for April but with the feature freeze coming up we already have a good idea for the features of this next tool-kit release.

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• Tizen and Samsung

• Journalists Should Stop Spreading Baseless Speculations That Microsoft Makes Billions From Android

• Elop Confirms That He Was Working for Microsoft All Along (Mole Inside Nokia)

• Kernel News: 3.14 Release Candidate 4, Systemd 209, AMD Free Software, More Benchmarks

• Erosion of Rights: Latest Headlines