We’ve written plenty of articles about helping you switch over to Linux from your current operating system. However, even with all of those materials at hand, it’s sometimes still difficult to take the leap of faith and actually try it out.

So, this article will be all about questions you might have about switching, and what you can do to ease yourself into the world of Linux. If you read it from start to finish, you’ll have plenty of answers and tips to succeed at Linux.

It was a slow news day today for Linux but a few tidbits stood out. First up is Danny Stieben with his article persuading prospects how easy Linux really is.

The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.1.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

This is a bugfix release of the v3.1 musl based branch. This release is based on the 3.14.30 kernel which has some critical security fixes.

Recently, Canonical has revealed the hardware specifications of Bq Aquarius E4.5 running Ubuntu Touch. It comes with a 4.5-inch screen with a 960×540 resolution, 13 MPX camera, a Quad Core ARM Cortex running at 1.3 GHz, 1 GB of RAM memory, 8 GB internal memory and Mali 400 graphics.

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The latest distribution I tried on the X1 Carbon (and the OS I'll ultimately use for running the X1 Carbon in a production capacity as my main system) is Fedora 21. Fedora 21 booted up on the X1 Carbon wonderfully without any issues aside from the trackpoint button clicks being wonky (though the button clicks in the corner of the trackpad works fine). Fedora 21 with Wayland also ran fine on this system with Intel HD Graphics 5500. Overall, it was a pleasant experience without any major problems.

Plex Media Server is a media center application that allows users to stream video and audio content to local and remote clients, such as mobile devices or smart TVs. We now take a closer look at this powerful server and client and see what's the fuss all about.

CoreOS has gained notoriety over the past few years as the creator of a new Linux distribution designed for massive, Google-scale server deployments. The company's star has risen along with the popularity of Linux containers -- a key component of CoreOS -- and their open source components are being widely incorporated by companies on the bleeding edge of distributed computing.

PfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD that has been built to be used as a firewall and router. A new iteration has been released and the distro now sports the 2.2 version number.

Librem 15 is a new Linux-powered laptop that will ship with completely free applications, drivers, and kernel. The crowdfunding campaign for this laptop is almost over and it has been a resounding success.

Another beautiful board is coming to kickstarter: it’s tiny and powerful. Black Swift runs on OpenWRT Linux, and it can be programmed in a bunch of languages, ranging from C/C++ to PHP, Python, Perl, and Bash scripting (there’s also a Node.js port).

GCC 4.9.2 and LLVM Clang 3.5.0 were benchmarked using the packages provided on Fedora 21 x86_64. The same Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon was used for all of the benchmarks, the first Broadwell laptop/ultrabook at Phoronix and it features the Core i7 5600U that's dual-core with Hyper Threading and tops out at 3.20GHz. Fedora 21 was running with the Linux 3.17.8 kernel while testing each of the provided compilers.

Back when DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 file-system development began being publicized, it was believed it wasn't going to be ready until at least 2013. Fast forward two years, HAMMER2 isn't yet used by default on this BSD operating system and it's still being actively developed.

As we haven't heard much about HAMMER2 in quite some times, I was looking through the DragonFlyBSD HAMMER2 Git commits and happy to see this BTree-based file-system succeeding the original HAMMER FS is still being pursued. HAMMER2 has shipped in DragonFlyBSD since version 3.8.0 but is not considered production ready.

Google sold Motorola to Lenovo, but retained the Advanced Research and Projects (ATAP) R&D group that runs the project. ATAP recently showed off a second generation prototype of the Ara phone, and earlier this month, Google announced plans to launch a 2015 pilot program in Puerto Rico. Project Ara has also recently attracted some interesting technology partners, including battery maker SolidEnergy, audio experts Sennheiser, and health accessory designer Lapka.

Together with ATAP's Project Tango for developing 3D sensing phones, Project Ara represents Google's vision for the smartphone future. The timing seems right, as the Android smartphone scene is looking a bit moribund compared to hot-ticket technologies like wearables, drones, and home automation.

Finnish startup Jolla is looking to crowdsource a new 64GB version of its tablet on Indiegogo, following the original campaign a few months ago.

For those unfamiliar with this project, Jolla aims to bring a new platform to the market with its tablet, which runs a Linux-based operating system called Sailfish OS.

European lab CERN is working to standardise 64bit Linux as the operating system for all if its control systems, according to test firm National Instruments (NI).

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