Sometimes a gift just falls in your lap. This month, it came in the form of an e-mail out of the blue from Jared Nielsen, one of two brothers (the other is J.R. Nielsen) who created The Hello World ...

Debian 9.0 Stretch is now the stable release, and Buster is the testing release. That means other Linux distributions that are based on Debian will be upgrading in the near future as well.

With some developer love and care, FreeBSD might make for a nice desktop alternative to GNU/Linux before long, one that could be tempting even for the die-hard Windows holdouts among us.