Tomorrow, Ubuntu's second 'long-term support' release, 8.04 or Hardy Heron, will propagate its way through the list of mirrors. OSNews took a short look at the beta release of Hardy Heron a few weeks ago, and concluded that "All in all, this release packs some interesting new features and frameworks, some of which should have been part of any Linux distribution three years ago. It is quite clearly a beta though, and definitely not ready yet to be labeled as a 'long term support' release." In anticipation of the release, El Reg caught up with Mark Shuttleworth in London.

Even though some users of the two desktops take every opportunity to make fun or flat-out attack one another, it is no secret to more reasonable people that the KDE and GNOME projects strive to make their respective desktops interoperate, and that the developers working on either of the two projects have a great deal of respect for one another. This has lead to an attempt to jointly organise the desktops' flagship conferences, in one place, in 2009.

Reviews of AmigaOS 4 are hard to come by, due to the rare nature of the operating system as well as the hardware it runs on. So, whenever a review does pop up, no matter how short, it's worth a look. This review, posted in the forums of Amigaworld.net, takes a quick (very quick) look at the classic version of AmigaOS 4, released early December 2007.

Comic: "Welcome".

Ars' Peter Bright wrote an article today entitled "From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X", in which he explains why he believes "Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it". These are rather harsh words, but there is a definitive element of truth in it. The article is part one in a three-part series.

Despite Microsoft's obvious focus on selling Windows Vista to its customers, it hasn't yet forgotten about all those people out there that still use Windows XP (personally, I use Windows XP MCE 2005). The company has confirmed it has finally 'released to manufacturing' the third service pack to Windows XP - 7 years after the operating system's original release.

Geek.com is running an opinion piece on the extensive reliance of programmers today on languages like Java and .NET. The author lambastes the performance penalties that are associated with running code inside virtualised environments, like Java's and .NET's. "It increases the compute burden on the CPU because in order to do something that should only require 1 million instructions (note that on modern CPUs 1 million instructions executes in about one two-thousandths (1/2000) of a second) now takes 200 million instructions. Literally. And while 200 million instructions can execute in about 1/10th of a second, it is still that much slower." The author poses an interesting challenge at the end of his piece - a challenge most OSNews readers will have already taken on. Note: Please note that many OSNews items now have a "read more" where the article in question is discussed in more detail.

Have you ever been annoyed by Linux' lack of a coherent graphical boot process? Graphics hardware causing problems during sleep/wake cycles? Problematic virtual terminal switches? Kernel-based mode-setting, a new feature of Xorg still in heavy development aims to solve many of these problems by moving the mode-setting code from the user-space X driver into the Linux kernel. Phoronix takes a look at this new feature.

Every now and then, the Haiku mailing lists explode with emails about something called the distribution guidelines. The Haiku guys set up a set of guidelines with regards to use of the Haiku trademarks and logos; the "Haiku" name may not be used in the distribution's name, official trademarks and logos must be excluded, but the Haiku icons and artwork may be used. In addition to these cosmetic and trademark issues, the guidelines explain what is needed in order to receive the official "Haiku compatible" logo.

Regular OSNews readers will notice we've had a drop-off in original articles over the past year or so. That's something we'd like to change. We'd like to encourage OSNews readers to submit articles by staging a contest wherein the best articles will be judged by OSNews staff and readers, and the winners will receive valuable prizes. All submitted articles that meet our submission guidelines will be published at OSNews. In addition to wanting articles to publish, this is also a talent search of sorts. We're hoping to identify talented OSNews readers to fill the ranks as editors and regular contributors. If you think you have the skills and desire to be a part of OSNews, please enter the contest, or just contact us. Read more for details on the contest.

aDesigner is "a disability simulator that helps designers ensure that their content and applications are accessible and usable by the visually impaired. The new version adds support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Flash content; presentation simulation function for ODF documents." Ever since the first graphic designers started to try to bend HTML to their will, people have complained that many web sites subvert the standards that early web architects designed to make navigating easier for the visually impaired. Read more for more discussion...

"Recently, both Novell and Red Hat went on record as dismissing the idea that the consumer Linux desktop is going to be taking off anytime soon. It's not? Has anyone told Asus and Xandros? Everex and gOS? How about Dell and Ubuntu? They're all doing great with consumer Linux desktops." The enterprise Linux leaders are not the ones making strides on the desktop. Does that mean that the Linux desktop has no future, or just that they've let their business focus let them drop the ball on that segment of the market?

iTWire interviews the newly-elected Debian Project Leader, Steve McIntyre. "A few days back, the project concluded its elections for the year and Steve McIntyre emerged as the victor in a three-cornered contest. McIntyre may well be the most watched elected official of a non-profit group - the direction the project takes is of vital concern to a great many businesses."

A Microsoft executive sent out a snotty email chastising anyone who has been encouraging people to purchase the Vista upgrade and install it without owning a valid Windows license. People discovered long ago that the Vista upgrade, which costs half of what full license costs, will install on new hardware without verification of a previous install. Microsoft's Eric Ligman points out, to those people who weren't aware, that this is just as much a violation of the license as "borrowing" an install disk from a friend.