As the last post of the year I wanted to sum up a short list of the best open source projects I met in 2008. Several from the list were created way before, but only got used by yours truly this year.

Without further delay:

• Identi.ca which I’m now using way more often than Twitter;
• Gwibber is pretty much the only way I’m using Twitter nowadays since I ditched Twihrl. This is a great project and best of all, I know it is under heavy development so more features should be added to it soon.
  
• GnomeDo is installed in every Linux computer I get my hands on, makes working on a computer so much easier and faster.
• Funambol is incredibly fascinating with their push-PIM technology, syncing Google Contacts really saved my week!
  
• Ubiquity is my GnomeDo for Firefox, now indispensible for me. If I want anything translated, placed on a map, searched, … Ubiquity comes to the rescue.
  
• Evolution actually suprised me quite a bit at how easy it was to use and at the same time incredibly resourceful for my emails, calendar, and contacts management.
  
• Bugzilla, once I learned my way through it I can’t imagine working with a development team without it.
  
• Gears has nicely bridged the online world with the offline world, with extreme simplicity for the end user.
  
• VirtualBox made my life easier to test different Linux distros I wanted throughout the year and nicely allowed me to use Windows without having restart my computer.
  
• Miro is what I use to watch several vidcasts, there is a plethora of channels subscribe to and the list is growing quite well.

With open source projects, you never know if there will be future releases but all of these projects seem to be quite healthy for now and hopefully next year will continue quite strong. Can’t wait to see what the open source world will bring in 2009!

What would be the best open source projects you’ve discovered in 2008?

This post is a short note to express my appreciation to the entire community behind the Linux kernel (and Ubuntu).

I moved recently and have been working for 2 months on a laptop, waiting to get internet installed at home so I could turn on my desktop once again. Today I bought a Sitecom Wifi USB adapter, tried it on my desktop (still) running Ubuntu 8.04 and it didn’t work.

I went to the store again, switched to a Linksys Wifi USB adapter, opened the box and the first thing I found was a note “run the installation CD first!!!”. Of course, I’m a Linux user so a ignored the warning, plugged the device in the USB, started my desktop and… everything worked!!

Thanks Canonical, the entire Linux community, and Linksys for making my life less complicated so I don’t have to install anything. The true plug-and-play concept!

Quite a long break, apologies, but since the last post I’ve changed countries (continents actually) and got a promotion at work. Even somedays that I wanted to post here, couldn’t because I didn’t have internet connection at home.

But, now we’re back. I’m not sure if as often as before but surely a couple times a week. Back to our wonderful world of open source.

OpenComputer.net is a project I’ll start on my spare time to help users gain familiarity with open source programs. I admit, not too long ago I wasn’t much aware of open source softwares and the benefit of using them.

With open source I’ve now been able to work productively between two operating systems, doing as much as I did before with freeware or proprietary projects. On a Windows machine, prefer open source since it is much safer from spyware and you can use many of the programs in Linux if you decide later to change (like I have). Added to that, you are using a software that is free for anyone to use.

Stop paying for proprietary software and supporting illegal copy distributions, you’ll be fine with open source.