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The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is a nonprofit organization behind the Python programming language. I am fortunate to be a PSF Fellow (honorable member for life,) a Python core developer, and the liaison between my company, Red Hat, and the PSF. Part of that liaison work is providing updates on what’s happening in the Python community. Here’s a look at what we have going on in December.

The microcontroller craze doesn't seem to be dying down—and that's a good thing because these products consistently succeed where the mobile market consistently fails: Users get open software and hardware, a portable form factor, and a wide choice of vendors and products that are built to last.

Apache Velocity is an open source, Java-based template engine and code generator that converts templates into source code. Because it is implemented in Java, it is capable of interpreting varied templates and generating code for any language (web, service, SQL, scripts, etc.), although it seems to be oriented mostly toward web development.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: When GNOME 3 was first released, many GNOME users were not ready to give up GNOME 2. The Mate (named after the yerba mate plant) project began as an effort to continue the GNOME 2 desktop, at first using GTK 2 (the toolkit GNOME 2 was based upon) and later incorporating GTK 3.

You may have used the Openbox desktop without knowing it: While Openbox is a great window manager on its own, it also serves as the window manager "engine" for desktop environments like LXDE and LXQT, and it can even manage KDE and GNOME. Aside from being the foundation for several desktops, Openbox is arguably one of the easiest window managers to configure for anyone who doesn't want to learn all the options to put into a config file.

I built my current desktop about three years ago and installed a solid-state drive (SSD). Later, I needed more storage space, so I installed a second drive—an older spindle and platter hard disk drive (HDD) that happened to be lying around. Recently, I decided to replace this HDD with an SSD.

This article walks through the steps for replacing the drive, including some commands used for identifying and configuring a drive and editing the configuration file Linux uses.

For some, the holidays are a hectic time of shopping, cooking, and a house overflowing with loved ones. For others, they’re quiet times spent with just a few friends, or even in solitude behind the warm glow of a computer monitor. And for still others, it’s a workday like any other.

No matter how you end up spending the holiday season this year, there’s comfort to be found in the Linux App Summit of 2019. This summit, which combined the strengths of everyone involved in developing applications for Linux, focused on a few major topics:

Joe's Window Manager (JWM for short) is a lightweight window manager for X11. It's written in C, minimally using Xlib. Because it's so small and simple, JWM makes a great window manager for slow or old computers. The Raspberry Pi barely registers that JWM is running, leaving precious system resources for more important tasks than the desktop.

I recently switched from MacOS to Elementary OS, a Linux distribution focused on ease of use and privacy. As a user-experience designer and a free software supporter, I take screenshots and annotate them all the time. After trying out several different tools, the one I enjoy the most by far is Ksnip, an open source tool licensed under GPLv2.

This is part 8 in an ongoing series about creating video games in Python 3 using the Pygame module. Previous articles are:

The 2.x series of Python is officially over, but converting code to Python 3 is easier than you think. Over the weekend, I spent an evening converting the frontend code of a 3D renderer (and its corresponding PySide version) to Python 3, and it was surprisingly simple in retrospect, although it seemed relatively hopeless during the refactoring process.

The FVWM window manager started out as modifications to TWM, back in 1993. After several years of iteration, what emerged is an extremely customizable environment where any behavior, action, or event is configurable. It has support for custom key bindings, mouse gestures, theming, scripting, and much more.

When you are working with complex distributed systems, you will likely come across the need for concurrent processing. At Mode.net, we deal daily with real-time, fast and resilient software. Building a global private network that dynamically routes packets at the millisecond scale wouldn’t be possible without a highly concurrent system.

At Red Hat, part of my job is to ensure that company messages maintain their meaning and effectiveness in my native language—Italian—so that customers in my region can learn not only about our products and services but also about our organizational values.

The work tends to be simple and straightforward. But in an open organization, even the tasks that seem small can present big opportunities for learning about the power of working the open way.

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.

Vim is a free and open source text editor that functions much like other text editors, such as Sublime and Notepad++. Vim can operate from a command-line interface (CLI) or a graphical user interface (GUI). This article explains how to change the colors and themes of your Vim CLI in Linux.

This GIF demonstrates how convenient it is to use Vim from the command line to edit a code file.

Free and open source software are no longer workplace taboos, at least not in the same way they were fifteen years ago. Today, distributed collaboration platforms and tools empower people around the world to contribute code, documentation, design, leadership, and other skills to open source projects. But do newcomers actually have a deep understanding of free and open source software?

The concept of a desktop may differ from one computer user to another. Many people see the desktop as a home base, or a comfy living room, or even a literal desktop where they place frequently used notepads, their best pens and pencils, and their favorite coffee mug. KDE, GNOME, Pantheon (and so on) provide that kind of comfort on Linux.

The Xfce desktop has a specific, self-stated goal: to be fast on a system with low resources while being visually appealing and user-friendly. It's been the de facto choice for lightweight Linux distributions (or remixes) for years and is often cited by its fans as a desktop that provides just enough to be useful, but never so much as to be a burden.

Preference of a terminal emulator can say a lot about a person's workflow. Is the ability to drive mouseless a must-have? Do you like to navigate between tabs or windows? There's something to be said about how it makes you feel, too. Does it have that cool factor? Tell us about your favorite terminal emulator by taking our poll or leaving us a comment. How many have you tried?

We asked our community to tell us about their experience with terminal emulators. Here are a few of the responses we received.