Have you looked at the HCL (Hardware Compatibly List) for your preferred Linux distribution lately? Do you see it? Exactly, it's a mess. Even with a strong community effort working to keep the list updated and as fresh as possible, it's nearly impossible to make the list worth the page it's rendered on.

For many like me IRC is the main chat medium to share information about things we love. Be it linux, Ubuntu, games, whatever; there are always channels with many like minded people to talk to. There are a huge number of IRC clients out there, listing them all for me would be an impossible task.

I've been in the IT industry for over 27 years now. I first was introduced to Linux almost 12 years ago, I've really been a part of the Linux community for over nine years now. You'd think in that time things would have gotten better for women in IT in general and the Linux community in particular. There are certainly more of us in IT and Linux than there were a decade ago, right?

One of the things I really like about the Linux community is that many members of the community are not shy in expressing how they feel. Many of my fellow journalists, having been on the receiving end of said expressions, might be wondering at this point if I am in need of some kind of intervention.

Years ago I already played a bit with Linux (It was Redhat 5.0 on my 386). At that time I thought the operating system wasn't yet ready for the desktop and after a while I reinstalled Windows. Things changed when Ubuntu 5.04 was released. This was the first time I really enjoyed Linux; the most important things worked, it was easy and it was just great!

The fact that the KDE team has pulled this off is inspiring. My stupid little top ten lists do not do justice to this accomplishment. Trying to narrow things I love to ten was not easy. I decided to focus on what was immediate. The big-picture changes are just too big to be dropped into a little list. Phonon, Solid, Decibal and all of the other big technologies didn’t even get on the list. They need their own articles to get the attention they deserve. The changes are so big and so interesting that it is easy to become overwhelmed trying to write about them. If that is true, imagine coding them!

People have been arguing about which Linux desktop environment is better for years. However, we need a "rational" way to decide. So, I've put together a list of things to compare the two.

Rigo Camens of BinaryFreedom makes an excellent analogy of sacrificing ideals for reaching goals faster "Purely speaking, if we sacrifice our ideals then we will accomplish our goals faster. For instance, it would take much less effort for somebody who wants an anarchist or socialist revolution to go in and kill every important member of government. The problem is that they are sacrificing their

Finding good Linux games, whether they’re community built or commercial offerings, isn’t always that easy and that’s why icclus.org maintain a Linux Gamers’ Game List. It has 371 games listed at the time of writing.