"On the 2008 GTK+ Hackfest in Berlin, Imendio’s GTK+ hackers presented their vision of GTK+’s future and the reasons why they think that GTK+ has to make a step forward, embrace change and break ABI compatibility. Other GTK+ developers have also voiced their opinions, listing parts of GTK+ that need serious love, but state that they don’t require breakage. Whether or not these are the things that will mark the road to GTK+ 3.0, almost all of them need attention. And give hints to the shape of things to come."

"Sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is a stable distribution, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't change and improve - even inside of release cycles. Case in point is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 now available as a Beta. The 5.2 release is the second incremental release since RHEL 5 was released in March of 2007 (RHEL 5.1 Beta appeared in August of 2007). With the 5.2 release Red Hat is adding virtualization enhancements including the ability to handle a 64 CPU system. Additionally the critical 'libvirt' technology which helps to manage the virtualization instances now gets remote management support."

GNOME 2.22 isn't officially released yet, but here's a first look already. "Every six months, the GNOME team prepares a new and revolutionary release of the ever popular GNOME desktop environment. Today, we are proud to introduce you to the latest and greatest features of an 100% FREE and open source desktop. Whether you are on a Solaris machine or the latest Ubuntu distribution, GNOME is there and with every new release it makes your life... Simply Beautiful! Let's have a look at the new features of GNOME 2.22."

"Does GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's backflip over the Novell-Microsoft deal a few days ago mean that he has finally been convinced that he is on a one-way path to nowhere? Has he realised that his own project, Mono, is actually putting GNOME on a development track that can leave it open to patent claims one day? And has he realised that creating Moonlight, a clone of Microsoft's Silverlight, (with which the company hopes to trump Adobe's Flash) is not going to advance the cause of free software one iota?"

Comic: "Insecurity".

"Unlike the myths that are behind the prevention of Linux adoption, this piece will closely examine the indisputable obstacles and what will have to be done to overcome each of them. In the past, many desktop Linux users have opted to simply point to the hardware industry or Microsoft as the root cause of a lack of mainstream adoption. In reality, there are actually core issues extending beyond hardware - and competition from the proprietary markets - that simply must be dealt with head on. With that said, hardware compatibility and competition from closed-source vendors are valid issues, just not solid core excuses for the lack of mainstream interest. Here are the real hurdles."

"Since the conclusion of the SMPng project, the focus of SMP development in FreeBSD has shifted from deploying locking infrastructure to careful profiling and optimization of kernel SMP strategies for increased performance on common workloads. FreeBSD 7.0 was the first release to benefit from this optimization work." The status of this work includes MySQL workload benchmarks and memory allocator performance in the new FreeBSD 8 branch. Also, here is a recent presentation showing FreeBSD compared to several other operating systems like NetBSD, DrangonFly, Solaris, and Linux.

Apparantly, Silverlight is doing well. It was announced at a MIX '08 keynote that Silverlight is being installed on internet users' machines at a rate of 1.5 million per day. Silverlight is being used in places like Netflix and to webcast over 3000 hours of the 2008 Olympic Games.

PCMag compared Ubuntu, Windows, and Mac OS X to one another. "Now that the major OSs all run on Intel chips, the playing field is pretty leveled out. We compared the heavy hitters in an eight-point test to find who wins the OS battle."

Ars takes a look at KDE 4.0.2. "When KDE 4.0 was officially released in January, there were a lot of gaping holes in basic functionality. During the past few months, the codebase has matured considerably, and the environment is steadily approaching the point where it will be sufficiently robust for widespread day-to-day use. Although there are still many features missing, version 4.0.2 - which was released last week - offers an improved user experience. We tested KDE 4.0.2 with the recently released Kubuntu 8.04 alpha 6." In addition, there is a new 'visual changelog' for KDE 4.1.

"One major feature present in Fedora 9 will be the ext4 implementation. The new filesystem will not be the default for the distribution, but will be available for users and systems administrators to enable. New functionality includes larger capacities and online defragmentation, for better performance and more reliability. To find out more, we talked with Eric Sandeen, Fedora project member and filesystem developer at Red Hat."

Microsoft Corp. on Friday asked that a lawsuit claiming it duped consumers in a Windows Vista marketing program be suspended while the company appeals a judge's decision to grant the case class-action status. If granted, the motion would also postpone any new disclosures of potentially embarrassing company e-mails. Last month, the release of similar documents showed that top-level company executives struggled with the new operating system on machines labeled "Vista Capable," and that partners such as Dell Inc. warned Microsoft that the campaign would confuse consumers.

Comparisons between iPhone and the Wii have already been fairly abundant simply because the two have arguably garnered the top spots in"electronic gadget mindshare" for at least a year each. But looking at the demos today, OFB's Timothy R. Butler thinks perhaps the iPhone could be on its way to being the Wii of portable devices-- literally.

"Mozilla's greatest success to date has come from its online efforts with the Firefox web browser. Since at least October of last year they've been working on the Mozilla Prism effort to bring the online experience to the desktop. That effort is taking a major step forward today. Instead of struggling with Mozilla Prism to create a standalone desktop version of a Web app, there is now a point and click browser plugin to do the magic."