"After three weeks of using KDE 4 on my laptop, I continue to find new features and changes. I am aware of the dictionary of special names that make up the back end of the new KDE - Oxygen, Plasma, Phonon, and the rest - but just as often as the major features, it's the little items that I find welcome as much as the large ones. Increasingly, I'm looking at KDE 4 as a statement about what a desktop should be, and contrasting it with my own ideas on the subject."

Linuxseekers reviews Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, and concludes: "In conclusion, there is no doubt that Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is a great release. Great artwork! The hardware support for this release has been excellent with exception of the support for the two of my USB-based TV tuners (Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 900 and the less well-known Compro type)."

Two new software build systems were ported to Syllable Desktop: OMake and CMake. They are available here. Both are cross-platform and both work on a higher level than the classic Make. However, OMake is a Make replacement (with a quite similar syntax, even), whereas CMake works on top of Make by generating traditional Makefiles and other project files. To meet one of Syllable's milestone objectives, and in keeping with the project's strive to reduce complexity and advance the state of the art, OMake was selected as the preferred make system for native Syllable projects. Support for OMake was implemented in Builder, Syllable's module-level build system. OMake itself will be added to a future Developer's Delight SDK. The Syllable system and its applications will migrate to it over time. Ported software will keep using their own internal build systems.

User Account Control is easily one of the most hated features of Windows Vista, according to readers. The seemingly endless stream of UAC pop-ups, asking you to confirm this action or that action, just get in the way (and aren't particularly zippy, given the screen redraw). Others don't mind UAC, but there's no doubt it's a controversial 'feature' of the OS. At the RSA 2008 confab in San Francisco, Microsoft admitted that UAC was designed, in fact, to annoy. Microsoft's David Cross came out and said so: "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious," said Cross. Cross had more to say than just that: Microsoft is going to put more emphasis on whitelisting.

The SymphonyOS project released a new version. "The SymphonyOS Project is pleased to announce the release of SymphonyOne 2008.1, our first major release in almost a year. SymphonyOne is an almost 100% rewrite of all the Mezzo desktop code taking advantage of more features of fvwm to provide a smaller footprint and more stable environment. Based on Ubuntu 7.10, SymphonyOne provides a complete desktop environment and full Ubuntu compatibility on systems with as little as a 200mhz processor. SymphonyOne also introduces our new WebApps system which allows you to make any website into a program in your programs menu which runs as it’s own process in it’s own window."

"Symantec's comprehensive security report on the malware industry from July 1 to December 31, 2007, is now available in its 100+ page glory. Symantec broke down information on patch development time by operating system and by the type of vulnerability encountered. Surprisingly, Microsoft had the shortest time-to-patch over both halves of 2007. In the first part of the year, Microsoft released 38 patches (two of which involved third-party applications) with an average deployment time of 18 days. From July to December, Microsoft released 22 patches with an average patch time of six days. Red Hat came in second, at 32 days for the second half of the year and 36 days in the first half. That's quite a bit higher than Microsoft's average, but of the 227 vulnerabilities Red Hat patched in 2007, 226 of them involved third-party applications. Apple, Sun, and HP all lag well behind Microsoft and Red Hat, though the gap for each company differs significantly between the first and second halves of last year."