Ubuntu App Showdown was introduced with much fanfare during the last release cycle. And if you look at the number of apps submitted, it sure looked like a success story. But that's not it if you look at the list in a case by case manner. What happened to those hotshot apps? Are they still thriving? Unfortunately, most of them are not. Lets take a closer look.

WhatsApp and Viber are two of the finest and incredibly popular apps out there for Android. WhatsApp is my preferred way of keeping in touch with friends and family. Viber is not so far behind either. Since video and voice call features are also available in Viber, it's a more complete package. Very recently, Viber team had made their desktop plans very clear and Windows and Mac version were released soon enough. Now its Linux's turn, though Viber for Linux is available in 64 bit binaries only at the moment.

It seems like the whole XMir controversy hasn't affected the continued development of Ubuntu 13.10 after all, not even a little bit. The next Ubuntu 13.10, codenamed "Saucy Salamander", is steaming ahead and is supposed to arrive on date without any delay. Ubuntu Wallpaper Contest needs no introduction anymore. It happens with every new Ubuntu release cycle and like before, the latest collection doesn't disappoint either. 18 wallpapers were selected as the new defaults for Ubuntu 13.10. Here's how you download it. 

Canonical's Ubuntu Edge campaign missed its crowd-sourcing goal by a wide margin. Though 12.8 million USD is still a lot, and is by far the highest ever raised via crowd-sourcing, the intended 32 million goal was still a good 19 million away at the end of 30 days campaign. But I don't consider the failure of Ubuntu Edge campaign as a huge setback for Canonical. In my book, it was a risk worth taking. While Ubuntu Edge phone won't be getting made, Canonical CEO has just made it clear that, Ubuntu smartphone mission is still full steam ahead and one can expect the first Ubuntu Touch powered smartphones to arrive by early 2014.

Seems like a vast majority of operating systems out there is running some form of popular open source software underneath with the obvious exception of Windows. Android is pure Linux, and so is Ubuntu, Fedora, Tizen (formerly MeeGO), Firefox OS and the likes. Mac OS is built on Darwin (which shares many components with FreeBSD), an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system. Darwin forms the core set of components upon which OS X and iOS are based. And the list doesn't end there. According to a recent reveal by VGleaks, the operating system at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 4 is FreeBSD 9.0. 

KDE 4.11 was released few days back. And this latest KDE release has many important characteristics. First off, KDE 4.11 marks the end of Plasma Workspaces 1, part of the KDE SC 4 feature series. Focus of feature development will shift to Plasma Workspaces 2 now, performance improvements and bugfixing will concentrate on the 4.11 series. And to ease the transition, KDE 4.11 will be supported for at least two years. 

Most of you here must be familiar with elementary OS. If not, read our detailed review of elementary OS Luna first. eOS is basically an Ubuntu based Linux distro with a razor-sharp focus on user interface, just like the Mac OS. As a matter of fact, many elements of the eOS is indeed inspired from the latest iterations of Apple's desktop offering. Luna is the first stable version of the elementary OS ever to be released. And it is built on rock-solid Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin", which apparently is an LTS release. So no worries there.

In the earlier days, downloading of YouTube videos in Ubuntu required nothing more than a simple copy and paste action. But those clever hacks won't work in newer versions of Firefox or Chrome. That's were dedicated tools come in. And when it comes to the downloading of YouTube videos in Ubuntu, nothing beats Youtube-dl, a powerful command line tool for easy downloading of high quality videos from YouTube.

Elementary OS Luna final was released just a day ago. As we noted in our earlier elementary OS Luna review, the developers behind the project has a keen attention to detail, which is very visible in the overall styling of the OS. That include the default elementary OS wallpapers. They are the among the best you can have in any OS. And now, you can have them all in your Android phones and tablets too, through elementary Wallpapers app for Android.

Ubuntu Edge fund raising campaign started with a bang. Almost 5 million was raised in the first 48 hours itself! But things have not been very rosy ever since. And understandably so. Even though the campaign smashed through almost all previous records know to the internet, it is still not good enough to meet the lofty 32 million in 30 days goal set by Canonical. About 13 days to go and still, well above half the target is yet to be raised.

The recent NSA debacle was nothing short of a shocker to many. Government sponsored monitoring of its own citizens has been more widespread than most people thought. And yet, as users, we can't do much about it. Skype, now owned by Microsoft, is a widely-used, and proprietary, video chat and IM client used by people across platforms. Tox is a free and open source alternative to popular all-in-one communication platforms like Skype. If Tox becomes a reality, a good part of our daily life on the internet can really become private all over again.