Computerworld's Scot Finnie details 20 things you won't like in Windows Vista, with a visual tour to prove it. He says that MS has favored security over end-user productivity, making the user feel like a rat caught in a maze with all the protect-you-from-yourself password-entry and 'Continue' boxes required by the User Account Controls feature. "Business and home users will be nonplussed by the blizzard of protect-you-from-yourself password-entry and 'Continue' boxes required by the User Account Controls feature, for example." Update: Apparantly, Vista Beta 2 sucks up battery juice much faster than XP does.

"Firefox 1.5.0.4 is a security update that is part of our ongoing program to provide a safe Internet experience for our customers. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version." You guessed it, general bugfix and security fix release.

BetterDesktop has published its research results concerning ease of use and usability on GNOME. "Below are videos that we have taken of user tests. Please consider when watching the videos, that they may touch on many parts of the desktop. For example, a test that deals with changing the background may involve Nautilus or GNOME Control Center. In other words, there is a lot to learn from these videos! In addition to providing the videos, we have also aggregated some of the Data Results to see stats on specific tests. We have also created some Research Reports on this data."

The popularity of Apple Computer's iPod digital music players is helping it sell more Macs, but so far it hasn't been enough to spark a rise in the company's share of the personal computer market. According to research firm Gartner, worldwide PC shipments totaled 57 million units in the first quarter of 2006, representing a 13.1 percent increase over the same period last year. But in that time, Apple's share of the worldwide market slipped from 2.2 percent to a mere 2.0 percent.

Three or four years ago, open-source providers enjoyed plenty of attention. But now some of the disruptive energy seems to have dropped away, as attention turns increasingly to the collaborative potential of the Web. Google and the buzzword du jour, Web 2.0, are capturing the attention once enjoyed by the struggle between Linux, Windows and Unix. ZDNet UK sat down with Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik at the company's user summit in Nashville for a brief discussion on how he intends to keep his company on the cutting edge and battle the biggest threats to its future success.

Polypaudio is a relatively new cross-platform networked sound server project. The first release came out in July, 2004, the software has been released under the LGPL. "Polypaudio is a networked sound server for Linux and other Unix like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is intended to be an improved drop-in replacement for the Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESOUND)." The main function of a sound server is to allow multiple audio applications to simultaneously share the same sound card, the networking capabilities extend this ability across machines.

"I'm pleased to announce the release of Einstein Platform 2006.6 for MacOS X (PPC & Intel) and for arm-linux." And what exactly is it? "Einstein Platform is a way to transform a computer in a Newton device. It's NewtonOS taking over existing architectures." Basically, a Newton emulator.

"Last week's announcement of Microsoft's new virtualization strategy at WinHEC 2006 conference brought in big interest. The importance of the announcement and the technical complexity of the products (the so-called Windows hypervisor will be integrated in the operating system itself) also raised customers' confusion, now trying to understand how the new products will address problems they today are solving with Virtual Server. Mike Neil, Virtual Machine Technologies Product Unit Manager at Microsoft, accepted to sit down with VirtualizationInfo and clarify some important points about Windows Server Virtualization, Virtual Machine Manager, the Softricity acquisition and more."

Dozens of readers submitted today's biggest news bugget: "Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, codenamed "Dapper Drake". This release includes both installable Desktop CDs and alternate text-mode installation CDs for several architectures, for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu." For those who like the visuals, OSDir provides the fix. Update by TH: Instructions on installing this release on Apple's MacBook.

The inevitable flood of Vista Beta 2 reviews are starting, and today there are two prominent reviews. Tom's Harware UK has spent 500 hours with Vista and given it a general thumbs up in its screenshot heavy review. Ars Technica also takes a look at the progress of Vista, but trivializes some larger Vista features, such as the completely rewritten Windows Mail.

Microsoft is to overhaul Windows' graphic driver model after realising that the one that will ship with Windows Vista - Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.0 - needs improvement in the way it shares GPU resources between programs and Windows itself.

The KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.3. Unusually for a maintenance release, new features were implemented due to the long release cycle of the eagerly-awaited KDE 4. Significant enhancements include an improved startup time, speedups in KHTML, over 800 minor issues fixed, small new features and new translations.

Novell's OpenSUSE 10.1 is a solid, multipurpose Linux-based operating system that - in addition to being a very good distribution in its own right - offers an early peek at the SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop product that Novell is set to ship this summer. What has always (and still does) set SUSE apart is the measure of management homogeneity that the distribution brings to this diverse set of components - mostly through its Yast system configuration framework. Overall, eWEEK Labs appreciated the ambitious scope of OpenSUSE 10.1's configuration tools, but we also ran into some areas in which Yast's reach frustratingly exceeded its grasp.

Sun Microsystems will fire up to 5000 workers this year, as the company tries to cut costs and make it easier to post quarterly profits. All told, Sun expects to cleave off between 11 per cent and 13 per cent of its 37500 person workforce. The firings mark the first mass layoff to take place under new CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Sun has historically been reluctant to let go of staff, despite Wall Street's constant calls to trim costs via layoffs. CNet has more.