Antonio Ospite explores Gnome 3 in fall-back mode and tries to make it look and behave more like Gnome 2.32 again. This summer Linus Torvalds made it to the news for complaining about the gnome-shell design; Gnome fall-back mode is the solution for those like Linus who can't - or better, do not want to - use gnome-shell just yet.

Ah, this is the news we've all been waiting for (well, it's old news already but I had more urgent matters to attend to today): Ice Cream Sandwich is definitely going to be released as open source. I still think not releasing Honeycomb's source code is a massive cop-out, but at least this is something.

"XDA member vari9 points us to an app developed by a few devs over at dexetra that basically does the same exact thing as Siri. Total development time? 8 hours, according to the devs. Needless to say, this little amount of time put in the app almost guarantees that it is in alpha stage and as such you are likely to receive weird answers or no answers at all, but as with everything in the world of Android, this is a work in progress, which will flourish rather soon due to the large interest that was generated on this technology thanks to Apple's marketing efforts." It's quite clearly not on the same level as Siri, but the fact these developers managed to get this far this quickly is pretty impressive. Then again, as long as Iris keeps interpreting 'Fiona Apple' as 'Fianna Apple', 'owner Apple' or 'George Bush' (?!), it's completely pointless to me. In any case, it's free on the Android Market.

So, somewhere in the middle of the night (at least for me) Samsung and Google held a joint event, in which they announced both the new Nexus phone, the Galaxy Nexus, and Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. While the Galaxy Nexus is a pretty impressive phone, what we got to see from Ice Cream Sandwich surely didn't drop too many jaws.

What many of us wondered the moment Research In Motion announced the PlayBook's QNX-based operating system has now transpired: the Canadian smartphone and tablet company has announced BBX, their QNX-based operating system for both smartphones and tablets - in other words, the expansion of the PlayBook operating system into smartphones.

Version 1.3.2 of the Icaros Desktop is now available. Icaros Desktop is one of the prime AROS distributions, ready to be used on your desktop today - no fancy PowerPC hardware required (like with AmigaOS or MorphOS). If I can get this running, it might be about time we took a closer look at this, don't you think? Thoughts?

Well, its not official yet, but Microsoft's Windows 7 has now become the most widely used operating system. . . Windows 7 now has a strong 40.21% share of all desktop operating systems around the world whereas, the usage share of Windows XP has slipped to 38.64%. All this happened a couple of days back (in October). The rise in usage of Windows 7 and the drop in usage of Windows XP has been consistent since the time Windows 7 was first launched.

The groundbreaking work he did with Ken Thompson led to the operating system behind everything from set-top boxes to the iPhone, but who sings the praises of the late Dennis Ritchie?

Yes, I'm hearing you guys - time to tone down a bit on the patent news. Hence, a summary here of recent developments concerning the various legal cases between Samsung and Apple. Today in The Netherlands, the judge ruled that Samsung will not be able to block the iPhone/iPad from the Dutch market. In the meantime, the Australian courts upheld the preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1, while the American courts ruled that while the Tab indeed infringes upon Apple's design patents, Apple has not yet convinced the judge that that actually matters. Tying this all together with earlier rulings we already covered - it seems like judges across the world are really, really willy-nilly. Update: DailyTech has some detailed visual comparisons between Samsung's and Apple's devices, as well with the various design patents. Huh. You don't say.

"Top-ranking Obama administration officials, including the US copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails. The e-mails, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, show the administration's cozy relationship with Hollywood and the music industry's lobbying arms, and its early support for the copyright-violation crackdown system publicly announced in July. One top official even used her personal e-mail account at least once during the negotiations with executives and lobbyists from companies ranging from AT&T to Universal Music." You don't say. Totally did not see this coming. Major surprise. Who'da thunk?

Ah, it's that time of the year again. We already had this up on the sidebar, but I figured we'd turn it into a proper front page item - mostly because I want to discuss the move by the Ubuntu team to no longer install GNOME 2 as the 'classic' desktop option - which pretty much ends any and all involvement for me with Ubuntu (KDE 4 here I come). There's more to this than just that, of course, so those of you who do like Unity still have enough reason to upgrade.

According to physorg.com (via popsci), the Cray Inc. XT5-HE supercomputer (Jaguar) is getting updated. The Department of Energy's Jaguar computer will be renamed Titan. This reported $97 million upgrade will be using AMD CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and is claimed to "be at least twice as fast and three times as energy efficient as today's fastest supercomputer, which is located in Japan." Good news for gamers.

So, today I finally joined the ranks of millions and millions of Android users, meaning I now have access to three of the major mobile platforms (Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7). I am, however, a complete Android noob, and I'm suspecting there will be many more Android noobs in the years to come - among OSNews readers as well. Hence, I figured this might be as good a time as any for an OSNews Asks item: Android all the things! Okay, technically that's not a question, but these are: what are the best Android applications? The most useful widgets? The most beautiful themes? Should you root your Android device? Is there any reason to add the Amazon App Store? Are there any tweaks to improve the Android experience? And so on.

It's a busy day for Apple today. Not only has the company launched its iCloud service for everyone, they also released Mac OS X 10.7.2. To top it all off, as expected, the company launched iOS 5.0 today, bringing a host of much-needed and long-awaited new features to iOS.