Friday Five: Linux Stories for the Weekend

It’s Friday, and your body may still be at work — but your brain has checked out for the weekend. Let’s give it something to do, by checking out these five posts you might have missed over the week.

Here at Linux.com we link to the stories of the day related to Linux and open source. But sometimes I run into posts and articles that don’t quite fit our news categories, or maybe they’re just worth calling out in particular. So I wanted to try something new, and post five pieces on Friday that are really worth reading and thinking about. (Hat tip to Ron Miller, from whom I’ve borrowed the idea…)

Why a JavaScript hater thinks everyone needs to learn JavaScript in the next year: A strong argument in favor of JavaScript, food for thought for anybody who’s thinking about learning a new (or their first) programming language.

Samba 3.6 release soon, Samba 4 pushed to late 2011, 2012: Paula Rooney looks at the upcoming Samba release and the long road to Samba 4.0.

Rebooting: Matthew Garrett looks at what happens when you reset a computer. (Technically, this was the week prior, but it’s interesting and this is the first week I’m doing this feature…)

Presenting GNOME Contacts: This looks pretty snazzy. Allan Day previews GNOME Contacts, a feature for GNOME 3.2 — and a bunch of mockups that look quite nice.

Living off Freedom: Lars Wirzenius, a longtime Debian contributor, writes about being laid off and pondering doing crowd-funded free software development. Would you pay someone to develop free software?

And of course, I’m sure you’ve checked out today’s Weekend Project on Xfce from Carla Schroder, and my piece from earlier this week on Linux Learners’ Student Day, and our other tutorials. Thoughts or comments? Suggestions for next week’s five? Let me know, and have a great weekend!