We don't cover a lot of Microsoft technology in this magazine (except in our "Interoperability" and "Living with Windows" issues), but sometimes the moving and shaking of Microsoft really does affect the rest of the high-tech industry. Redmond announced that they were laying off 18,000 people recently; big layoffs are always big news, and Microsoft's bold swipe dominated the high-tech headlines, but another important update from the empire received a lesser share of attention. New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's manifesto to his employees, dated July 10, 2014, set out a new direction for the company.

This month we bring you CentOS 7 (64-bit), a community enterprise operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the Fedora 20 Robotics spin (32-bit).

Updates on technologies, trends, and tools.

The Cinnamon and Mate desktop systems have stirred up plenty attention around the Linux world. We'll show you around these innovative new desktop systems and help you decide which is right for you.

The popular LXDE lightweight desktop is undergoing big changes under the hood, and the future looks bright.

Mate isn't just for Mint users. The DMDc project is Mate on top of Debian Testing.

The Xfce desktop travels light but still comes with all the essential features.

Almost all manufacturers of GPS devices use proprietary formats to save routes, tracks, and waypoints. Vendors unfortunately rarely offer Linux software for uploading and downloading or processing the data. Four GPS editors keep Linux users on the right track.

On June 10, Red Hat launched a new major release of its enterprise distribution, RHEL 7. We take a look to find out where RHEL is headed.

Make your blog look good on both desktop monitors and modern smartphones with high-resolution graphics by adding CSS and media queries to change the layout on the fly.