"The purpose of this article is not to emphasize the strengths and merits of Ubuntu user experience, but instead to shed a brighter light on areas that have been neglected due to shortage of time and resources, usability testing, and various software and artwork defects. I hope those who are sometimes overprotective of open-source software will take my recommendations with a pinch of salt and see this article for what it really tries to be: a vocal user experience report and constructive criticism."

The Gimp 2.4 was released today and it includes a number of new features, like scalable brushes, align tool, new selection tools, color Management and soft-proofing, Red Eye removal and much more. Unfortunately, there is still no 16bit per pixel support, which is useful for digital photography editing.

Microsoft has released its Virtual Machine Additions for Linux. "Virtual Machine Additions for Linux are designed to improve the usability and interoperability of running qualified Linux operating systems as guests or virtual machines of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1." Red Hat and SUSE are the obvious supported guests.

Turbolinux has followed Novell, Linspire, and Xandros in signing a patent and technology agreement with Microsoft. "In a deal that could lead to the creation of a unique cross-platform authentication system for heterogenous networks, Tokyo-based Linux distributor Turbolinux announced this morning, Japan time, it has reached an agreement with Microsoft for a cross-licensing of the two companies' patent portfolios."

At the last minute, Apple has changed the appearance of the Dock in Mac OS X Leopard when it is placed on the sides of the screen. If so, the dock will lose its much-criticised 3D appearance in favour of a more traditional 2D look. When placed at the bottom, the dock does retain its 3D appearance; however, a smart hacker has already found out that via a single command in the terminal, you can give the bottom dock the same 2D appearance. In other words, everybody who criticised the new dock (including yours truly): rejoice!

Apple sold 1.1 million iPhones during its fourth quarter, the company said in its results statement on Monday. This brought total sales of the iPhone to 1.39 million since its launch and pushed the company's revenue to USD 6.22m (GBP 3.04m) for the quarter. The good news was not solely to do with the iPhone, however, as the company also reported shipping 2.1 million Mac computers, representing 34 percent growth over the fourth quarter of 2006. Apple 'exceeded the previous quarterly record for Mac shipments by 400,000', the company said in the statement. Additionally, News.com tries to look beyond the marketing.

Ati AMD has released a new version of its graphics drivers that fix some long overdue bugs. "Today it's now time where the fglrx driver reaches yet another milestone. Not only does today's release address many of the outstanding bugs for the earlier GPU generations while also introducing a few new features, but it also delivers AIGLX support! Yes, you read that right. You can finally run your ATI graphics card with the fglrx driver and run Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz Fusion without using XGL!"

FeeBSD 7.0-beta1 has been released, with 6.3-beta1 on its way. "We have entered the final phases of the FreeBSD-7.0 Release cycle which also means the beginning of the FreeBSD-6.3 Release cycle. Because the people who support the ports for FreeBSD also need to go through a freeze cycle as part of releases we had decided to combine the two releases to try and minimize the impact on the ports maintainers."

"Not all major software versions carry the same weight. Consider the last two releases of the Fedora distribution. Fedora 7 offered little that was obvious to desktop users, despite some behind-the-scenes improvements and the opening of the release process to public scrutiny. By contrast, if Test 3 of Fedora 8 is any indication, the upcoming release, scheduled for next month, returns to the distribution's tradition of introducing a variety of innovations. Some of these innovations, like the new firewall tool, are minor, if still welcome. Others, like the IcedTea version of Java and Codec Buddy, are flawed, but may eventually find their way into other distributions."

PureMobile sent us in the most talked about recent HTC smartphone for a review, the TyTN-II (codename "Kaiser"). We give it a whirl and of course, we can't help out ourselves by comparing it to the iPhone but also to the QTek 9100.

Sun's starting to phase out mobile Java that's been the standard on cellphones and other small devices in favor of their standard edition, which are made for PCs everywhere. Sun VP James Gosling's reasoning for shifting everyone over to Java Standard Edition is because 'cellphones and TV set-top boxes are growing up', meaning they're getting enough processing power to handle all the demands of full-featured Java.

Earlier today, OSNews ran a story on a presentation held by Microsoft's Eric Traut, the man responsible for the 200 or so kernel and virtualisation engineers working at the company. Eric Traut is also the man who wrote the binary translation engine for in the earlier PowerPC versions of VirtualPC (interestingly, this engine is now used to run XBox 1 games on the XBox 360 ) - in other words, he knows what he is talking about when it comes to kernel engineering and virtualisation. His presentation was a very interesting thing to watch, and it offered a little bit more insight into Windows 7, the codename for the successor to Windows Vista, planned for 2010.

Microsoft ended three years of resistance on Monday and finally agreed to comply with a landmark 2004 antitrust decision by the European Commission. The defeated software giant announced it would not appeal against a decisive European Union court ruling two months ago that backed the Commission.

"In short, it allows Wine applications to be run just as easily as those native to Linux, meaning that they can be linked to or run from any directory, whether from a terminal or even a file manager like nautilus. It also handles some of the more awkward Wine extensions like .lnk and .msi, allowing them to be run with a double click."