As we near the end of the year, The DistRogue has already posted their summary of the major news this year for each of the major distros, but the post does not cover the big overall Linux news stories. So I thought I would cover a few of the big things that have happened for Linux as a whole.

Perhaps the most interesting things to happen this year has been the amazing number of low-cost, and very successful, Linux PCs. I already wrote a lot about it here, but basically it seems like the trend is for consumers to want PCs where for some reason fancy hardware is not possible, making Linux the only good choice due to Vista’s high requirements.

Another related story, although much older, is Dell beginning to sell computers with Ubuntu. In addition, Dell has continued to show support for open-source software by beginning to sell Ubuntu and other Linux OSs in other countries.

Although this is not strictly Linux news, and for that reason I have not covered it here before, Vista, which was released earlier this year, received mediocre reviews, and caused many people to consider alternative OSs to Vista.

I am sure I missed some important news stories, so post whatever you think the most important stories have been in the comments.