Jim Lynch: Tech Analyst and Community Manager

In one of my last columns I pointed out 5 Reasons Why World of Warcraft Doesn’t Suck. Patch 3.2 added some great stuff and helped improve playability considerably. Unfortunately, World of Warcraft is a business and so it’s not always about playability. Sometimes it’s all about profit and greed. Yes, greed. Naked, in-your-face, over-the-top, out-of [...]

There has been an amazing amount of hype about Chrome, Google’s upcoming operating system. Before I get into this column let’s look at what Google says Chrome is:
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running [...]

Last Tuesday I got an email from Apple saying that I could order Mac OS X Snow Leopard and have it delivered by today. Since I planned to buy it anyway, I hopped on the offer since it meant free shipping too. So instead of having to drive to the nearest Apple store (which is [...]

Well as the saying goes…all good things must come to an end. And so it is with this iteration of ExtremeTech and with my involvement with the site. It’s been a fantastic 8 years (wow! 8 years? unreal!) and we’ve all come a long, long way.
If you weren’t already aware, changes are afoot here at [...]

We’ve looked at a couple of religious based distributions such as Ubuntu: Christian Edition and Ubuntu: Muslim Edition. But there’s another version of Ubuntu…a dark and evil one. A version so hideous and so terrible that it’s name is only spoken in whispers among Linux users…
Yep! There really is a satanic version of Ubuntu and [...]

This week I decided to take a look at a lesser known distribution called Wolvix Linux.
Wolvix is based on Slackware and, according to the Wolvix site, is geared toward the home user. Wolvix uses the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and provides a somewhat greater range of apps than some of the other distributions.
But how well [...]

Linux has, in some ways, always been a bit politicized in the sense that there are true believers among Linux users and developers that all software should be truly free. When I say free, I mean free as in free to use and share with others without any restrictions on that usage or sharing. gNewSense [...]

Before I get into this review let me be clear that gOS is not “Google OS.” It is not put out by Google so nobody should be confused by its name. gOS stands for “Good OS” though it does contain a lot of links to Google Web apps, Google Gadgets, and the option to add [...]

A while back on ExtremeTech, I barked about why I thought World of Warcraft sucked. Well I’m happy to report that some (but not all) of my complaints have been answered by Blizzard. In fact, World of Warcraft doesn’t suck nearly as much as it used to and here’s why.
#5 Cold Weather Flying At Level [...]

I got an email from a reader a few days ago and he pointed me to a blog entry by the developer of Linux Mint, one of the most popular Linux distributions. I did a review of it recently and came to the conclusion that it’s pretty darn good for anybody interested in Linux on [...]