Issue #165 / Aug 2014

It is no secret that Ubuntu isn't the coolest, new-kid-on-the-block distro sensation anymore – actually that news is already a few years old. Still, Ubuntu has kept itself in the headlines with community dramas, desktop debates, and a crowd-funding effort to launch a mobile phone. The Ubuntu vision is so vast and enthralling that it is hard for the press – and the Ubuntu management – to let it go: a single unifying Linux popping up on phones, tablets, desktops, servers, and other devices that no one has even invented yet.

The new Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon Edition long-term support release offers five years of upgrades, tweaks, improvements, and stability through 2019. Mint 17 has spiffed up its appearance and made changes so apps launch faster and use fewer resources.

Updates on technologies, trends, and tools

Every Linux computer needs a filesystem, and users often choose a filesystem by habit or by default. But, if you're seeking stability, versatility, or a small performance advantage, it pays to take a closer look.

When building cloud environments, you need more than just a scalable infrastructure, you also need a high-performance storage component. We look at Ceph, a distributed object store and filesystem that pairs well in the cloud with OpenStack.

With some simple tuning, SSHFS performance is comparable to NFS almost across the board. In an effort to get even more performance from SSHFS, we examine SSHFS-MUX, which allows you to combine directories from multiple servers into a single mountpoint.

Manjaro and Antergos put the power of Arch Linux in a beginner-friendly form.

Baloo replaces Nepomuk as the semantic search engine on the KDE desktop, but it gets off to a bumpy start.

Klaus Knopper answers your Linux questions.

The KDE desktop has at least a thousand tweaks for configuring your user interface down to the tiniest detail. KDE SC 5, the next generation K desktop, will be no exception.