Good-bye, 2020! Thanks for the lessons!

2020 was a year to remember.  It started well too normally, with some distant news about a suspicious disease in Asia.  

However, we had heard similar news before, so nobody here paid a lot of attention.  

Everyone was in a rather hopeful mood.  It was the Year of the Metal Rat and sites were anticipating great luck to the natives of this sign, such as myself.

Little did I know how this year was going to affect me and everyone around me.

Soon, everything turned upside down, uncertainty was oozing from every wall as I was trying to find my way through a slippery moss-covered maze that seemed never-ending.  

I lost money, work increased three-fold and became an alien activity, family members got very sick, and, in general, stress and anxiety became the two monumental columns upon which collective experience rested... 

Some goals had to be postponed, daily life was interrupted and contradicting instructions were issued regularly, adding up to the reigning confusion.  Even my blog was almost abandoned!

When I look back, 2020 does not feel like a year; it is more like a zipped quinquennium, one that got the best of us and wrecked many lives.  It's the zombie year.

But today is the last day of 2020 and I would be truly ungrateful if I said that it was a year to throw away and forget.

This year pushed me to experiment with video/audio resources in Linux in a way that I never thought possible.  Kdenlive, the program that I never understood, became a friend for me and my everyday support for work.  My dream of working from home became an odd reality.  I intensified my home training physically, technically, and intellectually.

This year also drew me close to my loved ones in a way that it is very difficult to put in words...  Family and friends... But I am talking about the good friends, the ones that see you through in dark times.  "The strength of the wolf is the pack", said the wolves in The Jungle Book.

And I would not be lying if I said that there are things that 2020 brought that I do not want to lose when "normal" comes back.

The overwhelming events today feel like heavy, absurd gifts that I do not know how to use.   Like a rain of gigantic popcorn that buried me.

Yet, at dawn, I can say...

Happy 2019!

2018 brought a lot of changes.  Some of them were surprising, some others produced grief.  It was a bumpy ride, I would say.

The new year is about to begin here and I want to collect some predictions in the Linux world for these coming 365 days.

From OMG!Ubuntu!

From Linux Journal

From Network World

Let's see how it goes.

Whatever it is...

Happy 2019!

January 2018 is gone

January 2018 is gone.
It was a pretty hectic month for me... so much, in fact, that the 31 days passed and I could not post a single entry on this blog.

It is not that there were not interesting topics to write about.  I could have posted, for example, about the release of the Elive beta 2.9.22, which promised Korean and Japanese support. However, I could not even get the release.

Or I could have posted about LibreOffice, or Firefox Quantum, or the Microsoft-wants-Valve horror...

To be honest, January flew.  I was busy with a writing project on the first two weeks of the month.  Almost simultaneously, my daughter started her summer courses in preparation for her new school.

The weather got crazy and temperature dropped.  I got sick.

Then, during the third week, more courses.  And another writing project with a very close deadline popped up. I had a relapse on the last week.

Now, I am getting better and January is gone, so this is my first post of the year:

The beta 2.9. 26 of Elive is now available!


According to the release announcement, this new version includes:

• Greatly improved designs for clock and battery, clock is shown by default, the battery includes intuitive colors useful for show the status
• Improved initial configurations for hardware accelerated features with optimal autodetections and skipping in not supported ones like virtualmachines
• Lock screen: greatly improved design and a small fix included for wrong passwords attempts
• Massive rewrite of keyboard bindings greatly improved for a stable and productive system, all the media keys from special keyboards are assigned to the best launchers and features
• Desktop application launchers improvements, fixes and new includes, a new application is included to restart to a new clean desktop configuration, improved ebook support
• Persistence: improved speed disabling some disk usage
• Public folder sharing fixed

 I am presently downloading it.

(Interesting... My last post of 2017 and the first post of 2018 are on Elive...)


 

Backing up

Well, it's almost New Year Eve... and I am backing up all of my information to a portable HD.

Lots of pictures, documents, you name it, must be stored.

I hope I can finish before the new year starts!

Happy 2015!!!

I read it again:  2015 will be the year of the Linux desktop.


The way I see it, 2010 was the Year of the Linux Desktop.  At least it was for me.  That's when I discovered that I did not need Windows at all and I fully migrated to Linux.  I haven't needed Windows at all since then.

2015 will be, surely, an interesting year.

For all of you, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

And for Linux communities... thanks for one more year of happy computing with Linux!