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Everybody loves Vim (aside from Dvorak and Emacs users). Vim is so popular that there are entire web browsers dedicated to navigating the web with Vim keybindings, a Vim mode in the wildly popular Zsh terminal emulator, and even a text editor.

Social impact happens when leaders deploy individuals and resources to make positive change, but many social efforts are lacking technology resources that are up to the task of serving these change-makers. However, there are organizations helping to accelerate tech for good by connecting developers who want to make a change with communities and nonprofits who desperately need better technology. These organizations often serve specific audiences and recruit specific kinds of technologists, but they all share a common thread: open source.

In the first article in this series, you created a very small, one-line Bash script and explored the reasons for creating shell scripts and why they are the most efficient option for the system administrator, rather than compiled programs. In the second article, you began the task of creating a fairly simple template that you can use as a starting point for other Bash programs, then explored ways to test it.

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

Maybe you don't like desktops. Maybe even a lightweight window manager seems excessive to you. Maybe all you really use is a graphical user interface (GUI) application or two, and you're otherwise perfectly happy living in a terminal all day. If one or more of these sentiments sound familiar, then Ratpoison is the solution.

What is in a Kubernetes namespace? As Shakespeare once wrote, which we call a namespace, by any other name, would still be a virtual cluster. By virtual cluster, I mean Kubernetes can offer multiple Kubernetes clusters on a single cluster, much like a virtual machine is an abstraction of its host. According to the Kubernetes docs:

Kubernetes supports multiple virtual clusters backed by the same physical cluster. These virtual clusters are called namespaces.

In the first article in this series, you created a very small, one-line Bash script and explored the reasons for creating shell scripts and why they are the most efficient option for the system administrator, rather than compiled programs.

Sysadmins, those of us who run and manage Linux computers most closely, have direct access to tools that help us work more efficiently. To help you use these tools to their maximum benefit to make your life easier, this series of articles explores using automation in the form of Bash shell scripts. It covers:

Preserving and resurrecting old computers is a popular part of the Linux hacker's ethos, and one way to help make that possible is with a desktop environment that doesn't use up scarce system resources. After all, the fact that a current version of Linux can run effectively on a computer over 15 years old is quite a feat, but it doesn't make the CPU and RAM any better than the day they were slotted in. There are extremely light desktops available, but there's usually a catch: the user must assemble the parts.

I use Vim a lot. I'm a site reliability engineer (SRE), and Vim is the one thing I know I can access on every machine in our fleet. I also like Emacs, with its wide variety of useful packages, ease of extending, and its many built-in tools. Because they each have their own set of commands, I have to actively switch codes in my head (usually after typing :wq in Emacs or trying to C+X in Vim).

Job interviews are hard for people on both sides of the table, but I've discovered that interviewing candidates for Kubernetes-related jobs has seemed especially hard lately. Why, you ask? For one thing, it's hard to find someone who can answer some of my questions. Also, it has been hard to confirm whether they have the right experience, regardless of their answers to my questions.

I'll skip over my musings on that topic and get to some questions that you should ask of any job candidate who would be working with Kubernetes.

Cloud adoption continues to grow as organizations seek to move away from legacy and monolithic strategies. Cloud-specific spending is expected to grow at more than six times the rate of general IT spending through 2020, according to McKinsey Research.

Imagine traveling into an alternate history where the Apple II GS and MacOS 7 were built upon open source POSIX, using all the same conventions as modern Linux, like plain-text configuration files and modular system design. What would such an OS have enabled for its users? You can answer these questions (and more!) with the Macintosh-like Virtual Window Manager (MLVWM).

At Mozilla, we think of open leadership as a set of principles, practices, and skills people can use to mobilize their communities to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. Open leaders design and build projects that empower others to collaborate within inclusive communities.

Package managers are an important part of working with modern Linux distributions. In the early days of Linux, life was more complicated. If you wanted to install a piece of software, you had to download a file (or files) and then configure the software to run on your particular system. This didn't make it very easy to install software.

The ROX desktop is no longer being actively developed, but its legacy resounds today, and even when it was active, it was a unique take on what a Linux desktop could be. While other desktops felt roughly similar to old Unix or Windows interfaces, ROX belongs solidly in the BeOS, AmigaOS, and RISC OS desktop camps.

Contributors are the lifeblood of many open source projects because they enable smaller projects to grow and improve without a lot of financial support and they bring fresh perspectives to the project. That is the case at Ushahidi, a non-profit organization that is building and using software to help raise the voices of underserved, marginalized communities.

When KDE 4 was released in 2008, KDE 3 went into support mode until support was dropped entirely. That's the usual lifecycle of software, desktops included, but the KDE 3 fanbase wasn't universally pleased with KDE 4, and some of them decided a fork was in order.

Cities and municipalities around the world are facing serious problems that are affecting citizens' safety and access to government services. Take Baltimore, for example, the home of Mosslabs.io and its founder/organizer Jacob Green, which experienced a ransomware attack that shut down the city's digital services for most of the summer, preventing people from buying real estate and doing other everyday business with the local government.

For a good number of years, there was a desktop operating system (OS) based on FreeBSD called PC-BSD. It was intended as an OS for general use, which was noteworthy because BSD development mostly focuses on servers. For most of its life, PC-BSD shipped with the KDE desktop by default, but the more KDE came to depend on Linux-specific technology, the more PC-BSD migrated away from it.