First Impressions of PC-BSD

PC-BSD 54 Comments
PC-BSD is a new FreeBSD 5.3 distribution, with a graphical installer and KDE 3.4 as its desktop. A new beta version was just released, and though I can't say I have much experience with FreeBSD, or any *BSD for that matter, I was curious enough to try it. And I'm glad I did. From a desktop user's point of view, completely oblivious to the many virtues and sound foundation of all things BSD, all I really ever wanted was an OS that is solid, easy to install and, well ... fun to work with.
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Apple’s Tiger vs. Windows XP 64-Bit Edition vs. Linux

Rumors 48 Comments
With servers, where there is a good economic model, Linux would clearly remain favored over Apple because of much deeper support from companies like HP and IBM. But on the desktop, for most users, Tiger is the clear winner. It has better desktop application bundles, better customer support, better hardware, good value and is easier to use. Read more here. Also, firm expects Apple to grab 4% US market share.
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GNU Classpath 0.15 released

  Submitted by Mark Wielaard Java 5 Comments
New in GNU Classpath 0.15: Optimized nio and nio.charset packages plus io streams integration leading to large speedups in character stream performance. To complement this new framework a native iconv based charset provider was added. Better support for free swing metal and pluggable lafs. Some org.omg.CORBA support added. Better java.beans support for the Eclipse Visual Editor Project. Completely lock free ThreadLocal implementation added. More javax.swing.text support for RTF and HTML. More flexible runtime interfaces and build configuration options added. Release announcement.
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The real Window of Opportunity for Linux

  Submitted by Patrick Linux 48 Comments
There's an opening for Linux to grab a much larger market share on the consumer desktop side over the next twelve to eighteen months, but penguin advocates need to pull their act together and hope a couple of software companies – or one big hardware company – decides to throw their weight into giving Microsoft heartburn.
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My Days with Longhorn

Windows 136 Comments
So, with WinHEC coming to a close, the biggest talk was of course the newest release of Microsoft (R) Windows (R) Codename Longhorn, now at build 5048. With nearly one year since the previous release (build 4074) build 5048 sports some new features and lacks some others. Recently, the talk was centered around the lack of WinFS, the new futuristic Windows File system. However, we'll get to all that a little later.
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