At last year’s Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Sony’s Tim Bird warned that the stalled progress in reducing Linux kernel size meant that Linux was ceding the huge market in IoT edge nodes to real-time operating systems (RTOSes). At this February’s ELC North America event, another figure who has long been at the center of the ELC scene — Free Electrons’  Michael Opdenacker — summed up the latest kernel shrinkage schemes as well as future possibilities. Due perhaps to Tim Bird’s exhortations, ELC 2017 had several presentations on reducing footprint, including Rob Landley’s Tutorial: Building the Simplest Possible Linux System.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, took to the stage at Open Source Summit in Los Angeles. In this keynote presentation, Torvalds joined The Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin in conversation about Linux kernel development and how to get young open source developers involved. Here are some highlights of their talk.

Picture this: You’ve launched an application (be it from your favorite desktop menu or from the command line) and you start using that launched app, only to have it lock up on you, stop performing, or unexpectedly die. You try to run the app again, but it turns out the original never truly shut down completely.

It goes without saying that every good Linux desktop environment offers the ability to search your file system for files and folders. If your default desktop doesn’t — because this is Linux — you can always install an app to make searching your directory hierarchy a breeze.

Sure, we can get by with boring old GNOME terminal, Konsole, and funny, rickety, old xterm. When you’re in the mood to try something new, however, take a look at these five cool and useful Linux terminals.

Linux includes a fairly massive array of tools available to meet almost every need. From development to security to productivity to administration…if you have to get it done, Linux is there to serve. One of the many tools that admins frequently turned to was netstat. However, the netstat command has been deprecated in favor of the faster, more human-readable ss command.

Chromebooks are steadily gaining market share. With the arrival of Android apps to the platform, Chromebooks have become an ideal platform for a very large user-base, and Chrome OS is a very important piece of technology in the current consumer space.

Believe it or not, Microsoft started shipping Linux with Windows as of June 2017, meaning you can run Linux applications from Windows as the second iteration of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2). While it’s primarily aimed at developers, Windows users will find WSL 2 to be a Linux environment from the comfort of a familiar desktop without any virtualization taking up extra resources. This is Linux running as a process on your Windows machine.