Erik Huggers, a Microsoft guy at the BBC, takes a look at Fedora 9 as his first Linux desktop and finds it surprisingly good."I am glad that I got a chance to test drive Fedora and as a result have come to believe in the potential of Linux as a mainstream operating system.As Ashley said in this post last year, the BBC does a lot of work with open standards already - but in the future we plan to do more.We want to make iPlayer work on all operating systems including open source ones like Fedora and I am confident we'll make good progress on this before the end of the year."

TestMac.net has published a quick look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard. "The biggest changes are under the hood. Snow Leopard is fast. Very fast. Like, surprisingly fast. From boot times to general application usage, Snow Leopard was noticeably quicker then Leopard when using the same system. Apple and 3rd party applications alike, they all launched faster and performed smoother. I'm sure this can be attributed to the new 64-bit architecture, but its amazing how much of a difference it really is." Screenshots included.

"Last week's news about Apple's use of SproutCore triggered a lot of discussion about the future of rich Internet applications, run-time environments, and JavaScript frameworks. While SproutCore has been referred to as "Cocoa for the web," its developer Charles Jolley says that the framework was "inspired by Cocoa," not really a port of Cocoa. But what if someone ported not just Cocoa, but also an Objective-C runtime the runs entirely in JavaScript via a browser? Well, the developers at 280 North did just that." Ars has the entire story.

Ryan Cartwright at Freesoftware Magazine has a hot little tutorial for anyone who wants to master some very fantastically useful (but lesser known) keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice.org (for Writer). Read the full story at FreeSoftwareMagazine.com.

The AIX operating system and other UNIX-like operating systems need a way to communicate with the kernel. This is done through the use of a shell. The Korn shell is the default shell used with AIX. Discover how to automate many tasks and save a great deal of time by writing your own Korn shells scripts.

On OSNews, we try to steer away from speaking of specific security incidents, trojans, or viruses, unless they are in one way or the other special, or very influential. Over the course of the past 12 months or so, many incidents concerning Mac security arose, but most, if not all, were lemons: they required the user to actively enter his administrator password, or to manually launch the malicious program. In my book, these cases do not constitute as serious breaches of security, and hence, OSNews ignored them. However, a new security breach has been making rounds around the internet lately, which does pose a serious breach in security.

Earlier this week, we reported on the Berlin Packaging API, an effort to consolidate the various different packaging formats and managers in the Linux world. Many compared this new effort to PackageKit, and today Linux.com is running an article detailing what PackageKit exactly is, with a few quotes from the project's lead developer, Richard Hughes.

In a recent interview with the British Sunday Observer, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, claimed that "it's the next billion who will change the way we think". Such a big claim deserves some critical house room. Will the internet really change the way we think? Or are we just getting carried away? Gary Richmond explores the implications of the Wikipedia open source/free software knowledge paradigm and what it might mean for the way we think. You can read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine

InfoWorld's Tom Yager speaks in favor of the RTFM approach to learning new skills, arguing that the knowledge gleaned from cracking a manual only in search of a specific answer is eroding software quality. "The reason is that developers don't allow themselves the time to look things up before they use them. Statement completion, context-sensitive help, generated code, unit testing, and automated analysis came about expressly to eliminate research and experimentation from the development cycle. The result, I think, speaks for itself. How many rookie coding blunders that lead to security vulnerabilities grow out of inadequately understood usage of a method or resource?"

The resource usage of browsers is an important aspect in modern-day computing, because the browser is taking on an ever more important role in day-to-day computing tasks. Hence, it may come as no surprise that many complaints regarding browsers are not about rendering speed or rendering quality, but about resource usage. Dot Net Perls ran an interesting benchmark on Windows Vista SP1, comparing 5 browsers to each other.

Yesterday, we reported on the statement several kernel developers had signed that urged hardware manufacturers to open up their Linux modules and drivers. "We, the undersigned Linux kernel developers, consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable," the statement read. Nvidia, which delivers probably the most prominent closed-source Linux driver, has reiterated its position concerning this matter.

We already know some of the directions Windows 7 will be exploring: a system-wide multitouch user interface framework, a focus on performance, all while building on top of the groundwork Windows Vista has laid out. While off-hand remarks have been made concerning the operating system's release date, it appears Microsoft now formalised the release date of Windows 7.

Canonical has released Ubuntu 8.04 Mobile Internet Device Edition, a version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution geared towards netbooks, mobile internet devices, UMPCs, subnotebooks, or whatever they're called this day of the week. It has a whole slew of optimisations geared specifically towards Intel's Atom platform, as well as a set of open source applications designed specifically for MIDs, all courtesy of Intel's Moblin project.

Analysts continue to trump the lack of applications being developed for Vista. Yet, as Randall Kennedy points out, "developers who write for Windows rarely target a specific version. Rather, they select a particular API framework and proceed from there." The supposed Vista 'app gap' is a straw man, Kennedy argues. "The real question should be: Why aren't developers leveraging the various iterations of the .Net framework?"