Barbie becomes a Debian developer

A recent Barbie book caused a row over its portrayal of women in technology. The book has since been withdrawn by Mattel, though you can still buy the Barbie The Computer Engineer doll on Amazon.

The blog Liberal Murmurs decided to do its own spin on the Barbie and technology story, and in its story Barbie becomes a Debian developer and creates systemd.

Liberal Murmurs on why it made its own Barbie story:

Some people may have seen recently that the Barbie series has a rather sexist book out about Barbie the Computer Engineer. Fortunately, there’s a way to improve this by making your own version. Thus, I made a short version about Barbie the Debian Developer and init system packager. More at Liberal Murmurs

Redditors shared their thoughts on Barbie taking on the systemd controversy:

"Navigating the open source political landscape is hard... let's go to the mall instead!" "This isn't even satirical, it's more like a fair summary of Debian in 2014. At least Barbie and Skipper are agents of change, not just victims of their own technical ineptitude like the original though. :D" More at Reddit

A Linux desktop based on Google's Material Design

Google has made some big changes in Android 5.0 with Material Design. And now one developer is working on creating a Linux desktop based on the Material Design guidelines by Google.