FOSSPicks
FOSSPicks
Nate explores the top FOSS including a utility to "curse" MP4s, the latest Gnome desktop, a fantastic Hexen source port, and a minimalistic RSS aggregator.
The FOSS Rises
If you visit www.killedbygoogle.com, you'll find almost 300 projects that have been relegated to Google's graveyard. These include the Google toolbar, which for over 20 years provided a Google search bar in browsers such as Internet Explorer. Linux users are unlikely to mourn this, but gamers everywhere have been lamenting Google's decision to kill off Steam for Chromebook after less than four years.
Most Chromebooks run a heavily modified version of Gentoo (ChromeOS), so in theory, users can keep gaming by installing the Linux version of Steam. However, this will run in a container within a VM and there's no dedicated GPU access.
Like the Chrome browser, ChromeOS is based on an open source project but contains proprietary elements. That means when the gods of Google decide to remove a particular feature such as Steam, the end user is always going to get stiffed. Of course, projects get nixed in the world of open source, too. In this month's FOSSPicks, I've even covered a source port of Hexen II based on a previously abandoned Linux project. However, this is the beauty of a community-led approach to software development. When there's a demand for a project to be maintained, it will be fulfilled.
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