Timothy R. Butler writes: "In this second part of the OfB Distribution Shootout, Eduardo Sánchez considers the distribution who nabbed our first annual Open Choice award last July -- Mandrake Linux. After finding Mandrake Linux 8.2 quite possibly the best GNU/Linux distribution ever released, Sánchez probes deep into its successor to see if it is a worthy replacement." Read the full review.

As others looked into the past, ExtremeTech is looking forward to 2003, asking: What's in store for desktop operating systems? Will Linux and Mac OS X go the way of OS/2, or is Windows doomed?

I just love year-end recaps, so here's another one, from Open for Business, with an analysis of Linux in 2002: This year has proven most interesting for GNU/Linux. While there were not any amazing surprises, there were numerous events that are noteworthy for review. The upshot to all of this is that most of what happened was good overall for the Free Software community.

From all of us at OSNews, we wish our readers a happy and prosperous 2003. 2002 was a great year for OSNews. We saw steady growth in readership, a huge effort by Eugenia to make the site better, and constant support and submissions by OSNews readers that kept the wheels turning. The bad economy didn't seem to dampen the action in the OS Arena, and may have even given Linux a boost as people look for more economical solutions. We hope that the world's economy improves, that the technophiles who read OSNews have and keep good jobs, and that ad rates go up. 2003 will probably see the launch of a sister site to OSNews. Please post with any ideas you have on a tech-oriented topic that's under-covered, and we may launch a site to cover it!

A Newsforge article posits that a lot of the action in Linux development in the near future will be in Asia. Much of this is because in many parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa there is not as much entrenched IT infrastructure as in Europe and North America, so consumers will chose the most apt and economical solution available, without the burden of backward compatibility or prejudice. Also, with the concentration of electronics manufacture in places like Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and China, Linux is increasingly the OS of choice for devices.

News.com has published a 2002 in Review piece on the open source segment of the technology industry. Open source had a very good year in 2002, even as (or perhaps because) the rest of the industry suffered financially. Linux made strides in adoption at large companies and saw some major improvements in power and usability, Open Office became usable, Microsoft started to get scared, and Sun finally succumbed to "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Most of all, even though scores of small companies went out of business as venture funding from the last millennium finally ran out, Open Source software is still around, and flourishing.

Why do it? I am asked this question more often than I expected, even by existing Linux users who I expected to know as well as I the reasons for building a next-generation desktop Linux for the home user. So here are some of my reasons for thinking that we must spend the effort to create a better desktop on Linux than any existing version now has. Editor's Note: Due to a technical glitch, the first segment of this article was ommitted for some readers. If you missed the "why" section, before, you can read it now.

Jim wrote in to tell us about Sun posting the latest update of their Solaris/SPARC OS. The update, dated 12/02, is downloadable from the sun website here.

Gil Bates wrote "SPIN is an operating system that blurs the distinction between kernels and applications. Applications traditionally live in user-level address spaces, separated from kernel resources and services by an expensive protection boundary. With SPIN, applications can specialize the kernel by dynamically linking new code into the running system. Kernel extensions can add new kernel services, replace default policies, or simply migrate application functionality into the kernel address space. Sensitive kernel interfaces are secured via a restricted linker and the type-safe properties of the Modula-3 programming language. The result is a flexible operating system that helps applications run fast but doesn't crash." More can be found on the SPIN homepage. More on Modula-3 can be found here.

"Today we are looking at Linux Mandrake, a relative newcomer but which has picked up a large user base through the years which keep its development alive and well. The first version of Mandrake was based on Red Hat which is a fine distro in itself. The makers wanted too keep all that was good with Red Hat and get rid of all the bad, such as using KDE instead of GNOME as default desktop. Over the years, though, it has changed from simply being Red Hat repackaged into a separate distro in its own right. However if you dig deep enough you can still see the Red Hat roots but we are not really interested in that." You can read the full 7 page review over at Techseekers.

"The future of the Linux desktop? At least, I hope the new unified look and feel of Red Hat 8.0 is a hint at the future that the Linux desktop is moving to. There has been some adverse reaction from the Linux community toward the new interface. I am not one of the detractors. I appreciate that Red Hat is making a contribution to Linux and I also believe that it is the direction that the Linux desktop should be taking." This is a look at Red Hat 8.0 that focuses on the direction it sets for the future of the Linux desktop. Read the full article at Librenix.

Need a job? This classified posting appears to confirm that Microsoft is developing a new, original "next generation" shell to take advantage of the .NET framework for its next version of Windows. The ad says experience with "shell languages like PERL, Python and Bash" are a plus - interesting, I'd bet most of the experts in these areas are UNIX users.

A new version of popular server-side scripting lanaguage PHP was released today. Stephen Smith writes "PHP 4.3 includes bug fixes from PHP 4.2.3, as well as enhanced command line mode for non-web scripting, a better GD library, and more." Changelog can be found at php.net.

Nowadays, all you hear about is Windows, MacOS X, or GNU/Linux. However, what ever happened to the good old BeOS?