Starting on November 5th the Debian developers went to the polls to vote on a general resolution which would determine how init software and dependencies are handled in the venerable open source distribution. The result of the resolution will determine whether software packaged for Debian can depend on a specific implementation of init software. The init process is the first to start on Linux and UNIX operating systems and is responsible for bringing the operating system up and managing services.

The general resolution stirred up quite a bit of controversy with some developers wishing to keep software uncoupled from any specific init implementation. Others felt packages and upstream developers should be able to depend on a specific init package for the sake of simplicity or convenience. In the end, the votes were counted and it was decided no resolution would be passed addressing coupling software to init. This means, essentially, it will be up to individual packagers and upstream developers to decide whether to depend on one specific init implementation.

During an emotional speech delivered today at the Slush conference, Jolla's Marc Dillon unveiled the company's next product: the Jolla tablet, running Sailfish OS 2.0. He launched a crowdfunding campaign for the tablet, with a goal of $380,000 - which was achieved in less than three hours (this may be one of the fastest funding consumer electronics devices ever). I got in early, and was one of the very first people to back the tablet (just as I was one of the first to back the Jolla phone a year ago). A second round has already been announced. Big news for American readers: it'll be available in the US too.

The tablet itself is very similar in specifications to Nokia's N1 tablet, with an 1.8GHz quad-core Intel processor, 2GB RAM, 2048x1536 330ppi 7.85" IPS display, 32GB storage, and all the usual sensors and ports you have come to expect. It's quite light and compact, and has its own design - there's no way people are going to twist this one into an iPad copy.

The tablet is expected to be delivered to us early backers in May 2015, and I can't wait. Also, Mr. Dillon, keep rocking that beard.

Get building! Don't forget to incorporate that scrollwheel you need to awkwardly pinch.

Nokia - the part that remained in Finland after dumping its failing phone money pit at Microsoft - has just unveiled its first new hardware product: an Android tablet.

It runs what looks like stock Android Lollipop (yes! Yes! Yes!), with the only change being that it includes Nokia's own launcher. It's made out of aluminium, has a fully laminated display, and will supposedly cost a mere $249 - which is insanely cheap for a tablet with these kinds of specifications.

Two new releases from Apple today: iOS 8.1.1 and OS X 10.10.1 (don't try to pronounce it. You'll hurt yourself). iOS 8.1.1 brings speed improvements for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4s, while OS X 10.10.1 contains a whole bunch of bugfixes, most importantly relating to wifi. You know where to get them.

This is a very detailed description of this project in the form of a proper scientific publication, and is part of the Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, accompanied by a presentation. You may want to grab something to drink.

First thought?

Since the MATE desktop forked away from the abanndoned GNOME 2 project many users have reported problems getting the Compiz compositing manager to work properly with the MATE desktop environment. The Linux Mint distribution plans to fix this issue in their upcoming 17.1 release.

There are also plans to bring the latest version of the Cinnamon desktop to Linux Mint's Debian Edition. The next release of Mint's Debian Edition will be based on Debian's upcoming stable release, code name "Jessie". Details on developments happening across all editions of Linux Mint can be found in the project's latest blog post.

Jolla, the company behind Sailfish and the, uh, Jolla, today unveiled a teaser of an upcoming device - at least, that's what it looks like. The tagline is 'Something BIG is about to begin', indicating we're either looking at a tablet or a much larger phone. The countdown counts down to 19 November, so we don't have to wait long to find out what it's all about.

Meanwhile, my own Jolla collects dust in a drawer as it's simply not a very useful device without any proper 3rd party development activity going on. A few days ago, development on one of the few, proper Sailfish applications was halted, which really isn't helping.

I'm always interested in new hardware, but sadly, it will solve none of the deeper, harder problems that Sailfish faces.

While Microsoft has shifted focus back on traditional desktop Windows, Windows' Metro environment and Windows Phone seem to be on a path towards irrelevance. Microsoft's own applications for these platforms suck, third party applications generally suck or do not exist at all, while Microsoft's applications on iOS and Android are thriving and well-received.

It's easy to read too much into this - but it's also very hard not to.

Update: Ars Technica's comprehensive Lollipop review is a great companion to the Nexus 6 review.

Nexus 6 reviews are hitting the web all over the place, but as a general rule of thumb, the only one that matters comes from AnandTech. They conclude:

It's too big for my tastes - I prefer the 4.5"-5.0" mark - but even so, it's a little sad Google didn't try to make better use of the large display through software tricks. I had hoped that such a large Nexus phone, paired with the new Nexus 9, would finally urge Google to add proper multiwindow to Android (just copy Windows 8's Metro multiwindow. Microsoft got it right), but alas, they did not.

Rejoice! Google has started pushing the over-the-air updates to Android 5.0 Lollipop out to Nexus devices, so over the coming days you can expect an update notification on your phone or tablet. In case you don't want to wait, you can grab the system images straight from Google and update manually.

I just updated my Nexus 5 to Lollipop manually, and everything went okay. It's smooth, and the new Material Design is a breath of fresh air. Not much to report after an hour, of course, but it does feel like an entirely new phone.

Members of the Mageia Linux community have been waiting for a few weeks now for a beta release of Mageia 5. Several delays have held back the Mageia 5 beta and the project's developers have posted an update explaining why. It seems the problems started when Mageia updated its copy of the RPM package manager.

Problems continued when another software update, this time the GNU C library, caused the distribution's system installer to stop functioning properly.

All show stopping bugs have been fixed and Mageiia has finally pushed out their beta release for people to test. The upcoming launch of Mageia 5 is expected to take place at the end of January.