2001 is almost over (and already over for a lot of our readers), and there are plenty of ways to look at the past twelve months. LinuxPlanet has put together a list of their Linux best and worst of 2001: Favorite distro, desktop environment, browser, mail client and more. Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!

The 'Tales of a BeOS Refugee' seems to have touched a nerve. In the two weeks since it was published at OSNews, I have received more than 500 email responses from users of Mac OS, BeOS, Linux, and Windows. Most of the responses were point-by-point rejoinders to facts and observations in the original piece, some of them highly detailed. Because it was impossible to respond to everyone individually, and because I thought many people would appreciate being able to read some of the comments and my reactions to them, I've assembled this addendum: Reactions to "Tales of a BeOS Refugee". The piece includes further clarifications and extrapolations on my ideas about the Creator code and application binding, plus dozens of miscellaneous notes and continued comparisons between BeOS and OS X. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to write. As always, comments are welcome, but no guarantees on responses.

Amiga's CEO has posted his latest executive update in which Bill writes about the progress being made. Also included are videos of AmigaDE software running binary identical on various devices. For instance the Compaq iPAQ and Sharp Collie. Also Luca Diana recently visited the Amiga's headquarters and made a little report with pictures for us to enjoy, included is a picture of a PDA by Casio running the AmigaDE.

LinuxBIOS is a project aimed at replacing the proprietary legacy BIOSes of x86 PC hardware with an open, free, fast, and customizable BIOS. Eric Biederman of Linux NetworX has written an excellent article explaining how the BIOS works, how the boot process on x86 differs from PowerPC, SPARC, Alpha, and Itanium, and what people are using LinuxBIOS for.

After years of crashes, BSODs (Blue Screen of Death), Stop errors and dozens of other problems, Microsoft finally has delivered what most of us would think impossible from them: a rock stable operating system. Granted, Windows 2000 was a decent try, but it had its share of system crashes, even with the neatest possible installation. It was more susceptible to bad written device drivers than Windows XP, and that shows. Of course, it’s not like you can throw anything at XP and it will stay unharmed, drivers are a very important component of an operating system, and if they’re buggy they make the whole system unstable, whatever OS it is.

"Opera bills itself as "the fastest browser on earth!" -- and indeed it is fast. But to laud it only for its speed would miss the point. Much more impressive are Opera's other features for surfing the World Wide Web. Consider the menu item for quickly deleting cookie files that Web sites leave behind to track you. Or the item for rejecting pop-up windows, such as those pitching wireless cameras from X10." Read the rest of the review at CNN.

"Even for self-styled Mac pros, the introduction of the consumer-friendly iMac remains a watershed event in the history of Apple. Between its striking industrial design and appealing specs, the entry-level desktop system proved that master marketer Steve Jobs was truly back in Apple's saddle: The all-in-one system's distinctive aura of one-button consumer cool recalled the earliest Mac models, but its sub-$1,500 price point appealed to a far wider audience than those $3,000, mid-'80s trailblazers." Read the rest of the analysis at ExtremeTech.

You may or may not have heard about Lindows already. Lindows (the company) is a new Linux start-up, launched earlier this year by former MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson. The promise of Lindows (the Operating System) is to be an affordable alternative (Operating System) to Microsoft Windows. And, as an extra boon, this alternative to Windows (which promises to run all your Windows applications), will run Linux applications as well.

Kerneltrap interviewed Dave Jones who currently lives in London, employed by SuSE as a Linux kernel hacker. In the past six months since he graduated from the University of Glamorgan he has gotten involved in an impressive range of kernel related projects, including Powertweak, x86info, OProfile and the Kernel Janitors Project. Additionally, he maintains a -dj patch for the 2.5 development kernel, helping to sync it with the stable 2.4 kernel as well as offering increased stability.

In the year 2000, some pundits suggested the growing enthusiasm about open source was destined to give out. Once economic conditions returned to pre-dot-com levels, they reasoned, open source would be seen as a fad, just like the pet rock. The editorial at InfoWorld concludes that "the hype surrounding open source did not survive the year. But open source itself not only survived, it began to thrive in the business world."

There were an amazing number of people (around 300,000) who visited OSNews recently to read Scot Hacker's article on MacOSX. As part of the camp of BeOS refugees, I have been searching for some time for a suitable replacement. Many come close - FreeBSD is fantastic, but still complicated, the new school of Linuxes are very close to ready for me, even Windows XP has come a long way. My x86 machine is pretty fun - it gets a new OS every two weeks or so. But what does that say - that I like variety or that I can't find what I want? I'd suggest most of us still feel that we're missing something - otherwise, why read osnews.com?

There is a new version for the unstable build of mySQL 4.01, WindowMaker 0.80 (with some nice new features), GCC 3.03, while KDE released version 2.2.2 for FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems.

Just in time for Christmas, one of the well known AtheOS developers, Kristian Van Der Vliet ('Vanders'), released as a Christmas gift to the AtheOS community the first full scale native AtheOS application, the email client Mercury. We normally do not post on such application releases, but this app is indeed a major step for AtheOS. From Vanders and all of us here at OSNews, Merry Christmas to all !

The SkyOS developers are working on brining lots of new features in the new version 3.6 as you can see here. A new screenshot can be seen here as well. MenuetOS is prepared to release version 0.63 which enables the MTRRs for the Intel LFBs resulting to a much faster GUI. Also, a newer version of FreeVMS was released recently.