Two decades of Linux: the big open source stories of 2011

“In 1999, Linux founder Linus Torvalds joked about plans for
world domination. But as the Linux kernel celebrated its 20th
birthday this year, Linux, and open source in general, have
achieved a limited version of world domination…

But there’s still at least one place where Linux hasn’t achieved
the dreams of Tux the Penguin t-shirt wearing true believers, and
that’s the desktop. It isn’t from a lack of trying, to be sure,
with two major new Linux desktop environment releases this year:
GNOME 3.0 and Ubuntu’s Unity interface. GNOME 3.0 was a major
update for the GNOME Project, originally launched by Miguel de
Icaza and Frederico Mena in 1997. Efforts to kickstart a 3.0
version of the desktop environment had been in the works for almost
six years, finally gaining traction in 2008. In our review of the
release, we found the new shell—based on the Clutter drawing
toolkit—to be simple and unobtrusive, but ran into problems
with with graphics card compatibility in the openSUSE
implementation.

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