It was one of those weeks when the surprise gifts just kept on coming, so I think we can count it as a positive for Linux.
First up, and most exciting to me, was the arrival of KDE 4.2. KDE 4.2 really lives up to the potential of the KDE 4 series, and the KDE team deserves a big congrats for getting this release out the door.
It's been discouraging to note that there are still a lot of detractors for the 4.0 line--people are still ticked off about the "unfinished" nature of 4.0 itself, and tend to not trust anything labeled KDE 4. But when 4.0 was released, the KDE team warned everybody that this would be a transition release with a lot of work to do. Apparently, judging from the vitriol that came out at the time, people didn't get that memo.
That's too bad, because I've been using KDE 4.1 for some time now, and I have been very impressed with it--and I came up as a GNOME fan. If you have't tried it in a while, it's worth a look-see.
Also worth a look, and I plan to soon, is the Novell desktop aimed at education users that Novell and HP announced last month. Fellow Community Manager Joe Brockmeier is all geared up about a related event--it was the first thing he sent me after he got off the plane from Tasmania's Linux.conf.au conference last week:
"Novell and HP would like to formally acknowledge the community's contribution to HP's education repository and thank the openSUSE Education community for the work they have done to package and make available additional programs for open source education efforts."
This is indeed good news. I think education-oriented projects like the openSUSE Education project and K12LTSP are great for getting Linux out to those who really need computing power in the classroom now--without the high price of other systems.
Other good news came out of North Carolina this week: Red Hat has churned out "an annualized sales growth rate of 43% over the past five years, placing it at No. 11 on Forbes' 2009 survey of the 25 fastest-growing tech companies in the U.S."
The Forbes article goes on to tout Red Hat's software subscriptionsl as a potenitally recession-proof business model. With mainstream press like this, Red Hat's star should be rising in the coming weeks.
