"A current mania is to exile yourself for a certain period of time into the rival desktop environment, to see how bad (or not) you would feel: a KDE fan would use GNOME, while a GNOME guy would use KDE. I have undertaken the challenge myself, and it wasn't bad at all." More here. Additionally, a Gnome panel apps review.

It's been a long road to recovery, but after years of mediocre releases, and months of delays in the development process, FreeBSD is finally back on its feet with 6.2-RELEASE. Though it is an excellent operating system, even this latest version offers few or no competitive advantages over Solaris or the other BSDs in a server role, and can never hope to compete with commercial GNU/Linux distributions for desktop computers. FreeBSD 6.2 is what FreeBSD 5.0 needed to be, and for those who have already switched to other operating systems, there are few or no compelling reasons to go back. More here.

Dell has announced that more of their systems will be available with Linux pre-installed: "It's exciting to see the IdeaStorm community's interest in open source solutions like Linux and OpenOffice. We are listening, and as a result, we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations. This is another step towards ensuring that our customers have a good experience with Linux on our systems." In addition: " Dell recognizes our customers' desire to have unlimited control over the software on their PC. In fact, today XPS customers can opt-out of almost all preinstalled software. We will be expanding this effort in the coming months."

Apparently, Matt Dillion has decided to roll his own filesystem for DragonFly. "Here is my initial outline of the filesystem design. It is open for discussion. Please feel to ask questions for anything you do not understand. I do not intend to start coding anything for at least two weeks. There are currently two rough spots in the design. First, how to handle segment overflows in a multi-master environment. Such overflows can occur when the individual masters or slaves have different historical data retention policies. Second, where to store the regeneratable indexes."

A review of KateOS Live 3.2 Beta. "KateOS is a Polish (and polished!) distribution which is completely community-driven. The effects of the community work are pretty impressive. Kate is original and has its own feeling. Each new release of the system brings a few decent innovations and offers an even better GNU/Linux lightweight multimedia desktop. In my opinion it will soon be able to compete with other popular lightweight Linux-based systems like Xubuntu or Zenwalk."

The KDE project announces the availability of the third development snapshot of the upcoming KDE 4. This snapshot is meant as a reference for developers who want to play with parts of the new technology KDE 4 will provide, those who want to start porting their applications to the new KDE 4 platform and for those that want to start to develop applications based on KDE 4. This snapshot is not for end users, there is no guarantee that it will be stable, the interfaces are subject to changes at any time.

IBM is not ready to guarantee that its computer programs are compatible with Oracle's recently launched version of the Linux operating system, an IBM spokesman said on Friday. This means that if IBM software programs turn out to be incompatible with Oracle Enterprise Linux, then it will be up to Oracle - and not IBM - to resolve the issue, said IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon.

"Apple has said that Jobs knew of backdated option grants but "was unaware of the accounting implications", and an internal investigation cleared him of misconduct. Still, according to media reports, he's been questioned by authorities at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the investigation by federal authorities is ongoing. With such questions still swirling, some wonder about the possible downside of leaning so heavily on one person to drive the company's success - and what the Jobs-friendly board is doing to prepare for the possibility of losing its star pitchman."

"Windows Vista has been available to consumers for nearly a month now. Many new and revamped PCs incorporating Microsoft's latest operating system have been released, with lots more on the way. So far, we've looked at a range of Vista desktops from gaming rigs to all-in-one PCs to low-end machines, and by and large, we've liked what we've seen." By the way, some people really go to great lengths to... Well, I don't know.

Last September, some of the Debian Linux distribution's leadership wanted to make sure that Etch, the next version of Debian, arrived on its December 4th due date. Almost two months later, though, according to the February 17th Release Critical Bug Report memo to the Debian Developers Announcement list, there are still 541 release critical bugs.

The NetBSD Foundation announced that Force10 Networks, the pioneer in building and securing high performance networks, has leveraged NetBSD as the foundation for the Force10 Operating System (FTOS). Based on the open source UNIX-like system, FTOS provides the software scalability and resiliency that powers the Force10 TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers.

FreeBSD has a reputation of being slow in combination with MySQL, especially when compared to Linux. However, some recent improvements in the scheduler shows that FreeBSD now is pretty much on par with Linux. It also shows that Linux scales very badly after a certain amount of threads per CPU.

Linux distributor TerraSoft is accepting pre-orders for Sony Playstation 3 gaming devices pre-installed with Linux. Linux is installed alongside the Playstation 3's native gaming OS.

"Last month, in the first installment of this three-part series, I looked at Windows Vista kernel enhancements in the areas of processes and I/O. This time I'll cover advances in the way Windows Vista manages memory, as well as major improvements to system startup, shutdown, and power management." More here.