My favourite is KDE. Why? I'm not sure

I'm not sure I have a favourite distribution. The first disto I used (1999) was Debian. So I'm used to thinking first in terms of "apt-get/dpkg" rather than "yum/zypper/rpm/...".

My favourite distro tends to change every 9-18 months, butat times  it's been Debian, SuSE, Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora. The longest as my favorite would be openSuSE

Ubuntu, Debian and Mint seem to have the best variety in default software repositories, and I prefer Debian on my 7 rack servers, though  ~half of them (3) are CentOS, because Red Hat coded 'modules/drivers' were better for some prolinear/poweredge servers. I love how Ubuntu/Mint auto-play movies and mp3 music without having to load codecs separately.

4 favourite C's in Ubuntu setup

The introduction of Unity in Ubuntu was a great disappointment. For newcomers it would be an easy to use environment; in fact an ideal "granny" system. But for the serious tweaker it was a big step backwards.

Then came a little ray of hope with the MATE desktop. But even that wasn't perfect with the two configurations, MATE and GNOME, running side by side and confusing things. The advantage of MATE was the file browser which was better than Nautilus, because also at that time Nautilus lost important features like the "up to parent folder" button gone.

Then came a double break-through with the new GNOME session fallback desktop imitating Gnome 2 within Gnome 3 and thanks to Mr Kirby with his nautiluspatch which brought back the missing functions in nautilus....and I was over the moon.

Another poll, another vote

My dear readers!

I asked you to vote for my blog recently when FOSS Force blog ran their poll.
I am lucky enough to be included into the second round of this poll, which for some reasons has even more blogs in the list compared to the first round.
Please visit the poll page and cast your voice! I hope it will be in my favour.
Even if you don't want to vote, you can still find links to interesting blogs there!

Thank you!!!

Desktop Environment Article Contest Results

Thank You for everyone who took part in the contest of articles about your favourite Desktop Environment. And Thank You to everyone who ever considered to take part in the contest, but never managed to write anything.

I am happy to announce the winners now. Drums... Light... Maestro, please!

The third prize, which is a disk with a distribution of DarkDuck choice, goes to James Knight! This will be Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit from BuyLinuxCDs.co.uk.

The second price, which is a disk with a distribution of his own choice, goes to Chris Guiver from Australia.

And the first prize, an Amazon.com voucher for amount of just under 15 USD goes to Rolf Sommerhalder, also from Australia.

Congratulations and applause to all the winners!

You, my dear readers, will be able to read the winning articles soon. Stay tuned!

Do you like this blog? Vote for it!

My dear readers!

Do you think my blog about Linux and free open source software is the only similar in the Internet? Of course it is not!

How many other do you know? And how do you compare Linux notes from DarkDuck with others?

Now you have a fantastic opportunity to share your admiration! Vote for the blog(s) - up to two - in the poll organized by FOSS Force. It is easy!

Even if you don't want to vote, you should still follow the link above, for example to learn other alternatives to Linux notes from DarkDuck. Are there any you don't know about?

Open Source Encryption for everybody

This is a guest post provided by the team from BlockPRISM.org site: Stefan, Felix, Carolyn and Thomas

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With an increasing importance placed on communication via social media, privacy is imperative now more than ever over the Internet. The NSA scandal has shown that there is a great demand for secure communication on the Internet. However, many people do not try to protect their privacy by any means either because encryption is difficult to implement in social media or simply because they are unaware of the resources out there for encryption. Encryption needs to be made easily available for everyone so that privacy is no longer a concern.

That’s where BlockPrism comes in. BlockPrism is a non-profit organisation that works on the encryption plugin with the same name.

BlockPrism plugin encrypts messages in social networks and keeps your data yours. Our idea is to provide transparent free open source plug-ins and tools that let you communicate safely over the media you already use, in a simple way.

Once the plug-in is installed, messages can be sent to friends as they were before. However, when you now message a friend that has the plug-in installed as well, the message is encrypted before it leaves your browser and is decrypted in your friend’s browser before it is displayed to him or her.

We use a strong and proven public private key encryption for our system. Your message is encrypted with your friend's public key in your browser. The message can only be decrypted using your friend's private key. This private key is securely stored in your friend's browser so no one but him or her can access it.

Right now we have a Chrome browser plugin, which can be found at blockprism.org. We are working on Chromium, Firefox and Opera ports. The proof of concept can be seen working in Facebook Chat here (video).

An indiegogo campaign has also been launched to support progress. We launched the campaign to get help to finalize the browser plugin, give smartphone support , and provide support to other messaging services besides Facebook.

Our vision is to provide a simple means of encrypting messages for everybody. If you are interested, check us out and read more about the encryption process at blockprism.org

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