I have been under the impression that GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source Software have been gaining popularity, especially within the last couple years. One trip to Google Trends proved me wrong.

The Pitfalls of Open Source Litigation ran a couple of days ago. It painted a picture of Open Source software as being a minefield of grumpy litigious geeks who want to cash in with fat lawsuits, and no clear guidance for how to stay out of trouble. Oddly, this all seemed to come from a most unlikely source, the director of the Gnome Foundation, Stormy Peters.

There are times when I want to let my geekiness out and I want the world to know about it. I decided to share with you my favorite collection of Linux t-shirts that you also might like. Please share your ideas for healthy geeking in the comments.

I started using Ubuntu 4 months back, and since then I’ve been looking for ways to customize and tweak it to make Ubuntu more productive and look good. During my search, I came across many cool themes from various sources that I’d like to share with you all.

"...I like StumpWM, which is a tiling window manager modeled after ratpoison (and all other tiling managers before it). Its command set is a good mix of GNU Screen and emacs. Its also written in pure Common Lisp [...] I’ve been using StumpWM for a couple of days. I am trying to quit Gnome cold-turkey, and so far have been successful. All of my applications work..."

"...I decided to do my own build rather than live without xmonad, but rather than mucking about with tarballs I could at least now get the source from the package repository.

The appropriate steps, for anyone interested or having the same problem, are: ..."

Here is an interesting discussion of the changes KDE 4 (via Mandriva Linux 2009 pre-releases) brings to desktop interaction. It's a very comprehensive and thoughtful discussion and explanation of the new features KDE 4 introduces and what they mean for how you interact with your desktop.