The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude.

The latest TOP500 List of the fastest supercomputers in the world helped many in the technology community understand what open-source aficionados have known for years: Linux has quickly become the operating system of choice in the high-performance computing (HPC) market, growing from relative obscurity 15 years ago to powering 97 percent of the fastest computers in the world. But its appeal is found in more than cost or choice. Here are a few of the main reasons Linux has grown to own the lion's share of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems, with 233, this is down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The number of Chinese systems on the list rose from 63 to 76, giving the Asian nation nearly as many supercomputers as the United Kingdom, with 30; France, with 27; and Germany, with 23—combined. Japan also increased its showing, up to 30 from 28 on the previous list. HP has the lead in systems and now has 182 systems (36 percent), compared to IBM, with 176 systems (35 percent). HP had 196 systems (39 percent) six months ago, and IBM had 164 systems (33 percent) six months ago. In the system category, Cray remains third with 10 percent (50 systems).

I think Zorin OS 9 Core is a decent system, and those who it is aimed for, literally Windows migrants, will find everything they want in this operating system.

As this is an LTS edition, it will be supported for a long time. It means you can install it on your computer and forget about upgrade problems, as well as forget about the Microsoft empire.

As you know, GNU Linux is much more than just an OS. There is literally a whole sphere on the Internet dedicated to the penguin OS. If you read this post, you are probably inclined towards reading about Linux online. Among all the pages that you can find on the subject, there are a couple of websites that every Linux adventurer should have in his bookmarks. These websites are more than just tutorials or reviews. They are real tools that you can access from anywhere and share with everyone. So today I shall propose you a non-exhaustive list of sixteen websites that should be in your bookmarks. Some of them can also be useful for Windows or Mac users: that's the extent of their reach.

The Bang-bang thermal governor remains under discussion on the kernel mailing list after patches for it originally appeared a few months back. Bang-bang will hopefully be ready for an upcoming kernel release (Linux 3.17?) and the latest technical discussion about it can be found via the LKML archives.

One Linux kernel driver already planning to utilize the Bang-bang thermal governor is the "Acerhdf" driver that serves as the fan driver for Acer's Aspire One and other Acer systems where it has a simple fan that only supports being on or off. Up to now the acerhdf driver has handled its own on-off controls by post-manipulating the kernel's thermal subsystem trip point handling but will now be able to utilize the unified Bang-bang governor.

This article is based on a talk I gave at DockerCon this year. It will discuss Docker container security, where we are currently, and where we are headed.

Clint Savage is a system administrator for the Linux Foundation's Collaborative Projects. Here he discusses the new technologies he's been digging into lately, his favorite part of the job, and fond memories of a weeklong hackfest with his coworkers.

As businesses look beyond BlackBerry for smartphone security, Samsung and Google step up to the plate. Knox integration is coming in Android L.

Over 170 primary schools and secondary schools in Geneva are switching to Ubuntu for PCs used by teachers and students, which were earlier using a proprietary software. The move has been successfully completed for all the primary schools. For the rest 20 secondary schools, the migration is expected to be completed by the next academic year.

With Jono Bacon having recently left Canonical where he served as the Ubuntu Community Manager, Canonical has made some changes to its community team.

Canonical's Rick Spencer, the VP of Engineering, has done away with the "Community Manager" role in favor of a new "Community Team Manager" position that's now filled by Canonical's David Planella. Additionally, the rest of the community team (Michael Hall, Daniel Holback, and Nicholas Skaggs) now all carry the title as community managers.

Those interested in more information on Ubuntu's Community Team changes can be found from Rick's blog post.

The Firefox 31 web-browser is out this morning with new features.

New to Firefox 31 is improved download security by trying to block known malware (based upon Google's functionality in Chrome), a search box has been added to the new tab page, a new certificate verification library, HTML5 WebVTT support for video playback with subtitles, and various developer-focused improvements.

Users can download the Firefox 31 update from Mozilla.org

The GNOME developers behind the Nautilus project (now known as Files) have announced that version 3.13.2 is now available for download and testing.

Those wishing to see the Raspberry Pi B+ performance benchmarks with a Debian Linux host, the results are available from 1407220-BY-1407183GL47. To see how the results compare against your own Linux systems, with the Phoronix Test Suite you simply need to run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1407220-BY-1407183GL47 to conduct a quick, fully-automated, side-by-side performance comparison.

Smartwatches are still a fairly new category. Google revealed its big Android Wear initiative at its I/O developer conference in June. The company is hoping to do for smartwatches what Android proper did for smartphones. Rumors suggest Apple is also working on a smartwatch of its own, but the company hasn’t announced anything yet.

With games dominating the app market on both iOS and Android, it isn’t a surprise that a developer is already coming to the scene with a game for smartwatches. Now we can find out if anyone cares about gaming on a watch or whether most will just stick to playing Candy Crush Saga on their smartphone.

Mozilla has officially released Thunderbird 31.0, an email and RSS client, for all the available platforms, and the developers have actually made a number of improvements to the application.

The first version has been released in the Thunderbird 31.x branch, but unlike some of the previous updates, this one actually brings something interesting. It's been a while since Thunderbird received any real improvements, but that's not exactly Mozilla's fault.

NVIDIA announced this morning their new Shield Tablet and Shield Controller. The new Shield Tablet is a $299 Android tablet that's great for gaming and is mighty powerful with using the Tegra K1 SoC.

With being powered by the Tegra K1, the CPU and graphics performance is mighty powerful for the tablet with its Kepler-based GPU and four Cortex-A15 processor cores. The Shield Tablet has an 8-inch, 1920 x 1200 display and the WiFi version with 16GB of storage is going to sell for $299 USD.

Today in Linux news, Geary 0.7.0 was recently released despite the programmers' troubles with the IRS. Debian released an update the 6.0 branch of their old stable Linux distribution. A new Duke Nukem enhanced compilation game has hit beta. "GCC 5.0 is expected next year" and Linus is getting grumpy! And finally today, two new Mint 17 reviews round out the Linux news on this Monday July 21.

it’s no secret that I like Deepin 2014. But what’s not to like about something that’s good and has the potential to be even better. There are features (on the installer) that need to be implemented and several rough edges on the desktop that calls for more polishing, but in general, this is one desktop distribution that I think you should, at least, take for a test drive.

While we maybe living in a post-PC era, there is no denying the fact that the desktop OS still matters. Mac OS X is an operating system that is still ahead of Ubuntu when it comes to the race towards the number one desktop. Apple knows that, and that is why they seem to have put a lot of work in making Mac OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" as good as their mobile operating system, which is iOS. The goal here is convergence. Apple wants to build an ecosystem in which the desktop, the mobile, and the wearable operating systems work seamlessly together in harmony. This is the same thing Microsoft is aiming for and so is Google. And yes, Shuttleworth's brainchild Ubuntu is shooting for the same thing by working really hard on the next iteration of the open-source OS. But, with all these efforts, can Canonical match up with its competition?

Well, it can if it takes some of the great things its competitors are doing. Both Apple and Google are known for "borrowing" each other's ideas. If Canonical does a bit of that, its desktop might be able to reach a whole new level. So, if you are an Ubuntu fan wanting some of the best things from Apple's latest Yosemite on your desktop, here is a list of few things Canonical can steal or copy from Cupertino right away.

From ratpoison to Unity, I must have tried just about every Linux desktop environment available. The best Linux desktop, in my view: my main computer continues to run KDE's Plasma. No other alternative can match its design philosophy, configurability, or its innovations on the classical desktop.

Nor am I alone in my preferences. At a time when the Linux desktop offers six main alternatives (Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, Mate, Unity and Xfce), KDE Plasma consistently tops reader polls with an average of 35-40 percent. In such a diverse market, these figures indicate a broad appeal that other Linux desktop alternatives can't match.

I believe that one of the main reasons for this appeal is the KDE design philosophy. GNOME and Unity may offer a more aesthetic-looking default, but only at the cost of simplifying both the desktop and the utilities in the name of reducing clutter.