Two of the year's most user-friendly Linux distributions--SuSE Linux 8.1 and Red Hat Linux 8.0--have closed the gap between Windows and Linux. For those who have at least a few years of PC experience, it's now feasible to switch from Windows to Linux or, at the very least, use both--in a dual-boot environment or on separate machines. So, which of these alternatives should you choose? Read on.

Four new articles appeared today regarding Linux on the desktop: "As business looks to Linux desktops, some critical apps lacking", "Microsoft Says Linux on Desktops Would Hurt Growth", "Red Hat chief: Linux will take desktop market share from MS", "$199 PC with no Windows, no Intel inside".

"The latest gcc holds it own against Intel C++, winning some benchmarks it lost previously. There are still applications where Intel shines, but the differences between the compilers have narrowed. So which compiler is better? Like Einstein, I have to say the answer is relative." Read the article here.

"Well the Lindows.com folks haven't been idle between now and then. The latest version of Lindows was just released and we were surprised to find that Lindows has jumped all the way from version 2.0 to version 3.0. That's quite a leap in so short a time." Read the review at ExtremeTech. Recently, OSNews also posted a review of LindowsOS 3.0.

The leading OpenBSD programmer, Theo DeRaadt, has accused Sun Microsystems of hindering development of the open-source software for its newer computers, causing Sun to scramble to cooperate with the project in response.

A new study predicts that Linux will take over low-end servers and share the spotlight with .Net in high-end servers. Plus, hardware heavyweights HP, IBM and Sun--will lose out.

"Slackware 8.1 is a four-disk set. The first disk in the set is the only one you really, absolutely need to install Linux. The second CD is a live filesystem CD that can be used to boot into Linux without installation. Disks three and four contain source code and the "contribs" — software that's not part of the main distribution, but that you might want anyway." Read the review at UnixReview.

One of the great difficulties a hobbyist programmer faces when trying to start the development of his own OS is finding out where to start. Many books describe in-depth theoretical OS concepts, yet noone seems to take a hobyist programmer by the hand and bring him face to face with these concepts. This is precisely what this article aims at doing.

Bochs, the x86 emulator, will celebrate its version 2.0 soon. Changes include: CPU optimizations boost simulation speed by around 2x, Bochs now supports up to 8 hard drives, or 8 CDROMs, or any combination, added support for the AMD x86-64 instruction set used in their Hammer processor, added support for MMX instructions, added support for SSE and SSE2 instructions, remote GDB stub support.

"Version 4 of MySQL has been in development since 2001. By the time you read this, MySQL 4.0 should be a stable release (or at least be in late-beta -- not finished yet, but still quite suitable for development work that you expect to deploy later this year)." Read the article at LinuxMag. On other database news, mSQL 3.3 was released.

This is a possibly the last beta before the Amethyste Update 3 general release of Lycoris. Announcement, download the ISO and submit bugs.

J. Todd Slack emailed in and asked us to inform everyone that their donations towards the FreePepper project will be returned to all who contributed. The contributions from the community were a bit above $500 USD and that was obviously not enought as $11,000 were needed to open source Pepper. "I have come up with the funds privately to buy Pepper and I will be returning everyone's donations in the next few days. I thank everyone who donated" Mr Slack said. Pepper will stay commercial and it will not be open sourced.

A survey recently released by IDC finds that large networks of Windows servers are cheaper to run and maintain than Linux servers, even taking into account the higher software licensing costs for Windows. The catch? That survey was commissioned by Microsoft. A Reuters article about the study covers mostly how this study indicates a shift in Microsoft's marketing strategy toward Linux -- moving away from criticizing open source toward focusing on Windows' benefits.

A ZDNet article details the upcoming arguments in the antitrust suit brought by Sun Microsystems against Microsoft over Microsoft's treatment of the Java platform. Sun claims that Microsoft has distributed a crippled and incompatible version of Java in its (monopoly) operating system, which serves to undermine the Java platform. The article covers mostly background and history. It's pretty clear what Sun's case is, but less obvious how Microsoft will choose to defend itself.