Apple website Apple Gazette is reporting rumouring that Leopard will come with an all-new interface, supposedly with lots of black glossy things (similar to Vista, indeed): "Apple Gazette has received a tip from an apple insider that the Mac OS Aqua User Interface will be replaced with a new UI named Illuminous. The source goes on to say that we will see a demonstration of Illuminous at Macworld 2007." I have never heard of this website, so I cannot make an assessment of its reliability, but suffices to say that it is highly debatable. Interesting nonetheless. Update: More info.

PC-BSD 1.3 RC1 has been released. From the changelog: "Fixed icon size issues in KMenu; installer now does not display extended partitions; installer now can use empty primary partition space to install; fixed issue with BSDStats not properly reporting usage; fixed problem with 'Start' icon text not being translated properly; fixed issues when using installer to upgrade system from 1.2 to 1.3; closed numerous other issues from BETA2." Get it here.

"Mid November, Steve Ballmer said 'Linux uses our intellectual property' and Microsoft wanted to 'get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation.' Many people didn't understand what he really meant, among them the LXer editors. Therefore, LXer sent an Open Letter to the Waggener Edstrom Rapid Response team, and two weeks later, the answers are in (no pun intended). Check the full story for the answers a Microsoft Spokesperson gave us, which hopefully can answer some of our questions."

"The key to fixing a bug discovered in the field is accurate information about the system's state when the bug manifests itself. In this whitepaper, Abraham Kcholi and Gad Meir show how the Windows CE Error Reporting module can be used to retrieve that information."

"Perhaps it's just me, but I'm having a difficult time understanding Mark Shuttleworth, the Ubuntu founder, when he figured that openly trying to recruit developers from other Linux projects was a good idea. Doing so in a mailing list in the manner that he did was, to be brutally honest, in very poor taste. As luck would have it, the response has not been too exciting thus far."

Here is a review of SuSE Linux while here is a hacking guide to add non-free apps on 10.2.

"Microsoft Office isn't among the apps that will run natively on Intel-based Macs - and it won't be until the latter half of 2007, according to media reports. But when it does ship, Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite."

European governments have long complained about their dependence on Microsoft's software, but their rhetoric has not turned into a mass migration away from Windows. During the past few years, Europe's elected officials have made a lot of noise about ambitious projects to switch to open source software, including big migrations of government PCs in France, Germany, Spain and Norway. Yet the actual migrations have been negligible. More than 95 percent of all PCs used by European government workers still run on Windows, according to the market research firm IDC.

"In conclusion? I'm going to stick with it. It really is impressive with a great set of software installed by default (taking away perhaps a lot of my need for massive repos), nice touches like the new menu and use of Gnome control center etc." More here.

According to Google Trends, but also according to Distrowatch, our own statistics here at OSNews and overall sense of the industry during 2006, Ubuntu has a big leap in mind share ahead of its competition (please note that we don't dare to say "market share", although we are pretty confident that it's the most used Linux desktop out there today). The second Fedora has a very small edge ahead of SuSe (while in US is a clear second), while Debian is following fourth. Mandrake+Mandriva (add both names on Google Trends and then sum the results) is clearly way below the previous four distros, but a clear 5th nonetheless. Last year Ubuntu was only a bit ahead of the other distros worldwide, but 2006 seems to have skyrocketed the distribution in the people's minds and computers.

Our mobile-oriented sister site, Mobits, put together the third free service for you (first, second), a mobile web page that let's you access the 23 best J2ME phone applications created so far. Visit the mobile-optimized page with any browser at http://mobits.com/jad. There is space for two more J2ME apps in the page, so leave a comment if we forgot a deserving application out of the list (no games please). We hope that this page will prove helpful to users who just got a new cellphone or reseted their existing one and are in need of re-installing their Java apps as quickly as possible.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (what's with the middle initial?) has reviewed the recently released OpenSUSE 10.2. "Sooner than anyone expected it, Novell's openSUSE community Linux distribution project has delivered a new version: openSUSE 10.2. As a dyed-in-the-wool SUSE user since S.u.S.E Linux 4.2 first appeared in 1996, I decided to immediately give this version a try."

OS X is more appealing to enterprises as a desktop operating system than ever before and although it is unlikely to take market share away from Windows, the Mac could reduce the number of Linux-based desktops, according to research group Gartner. In a report published by Gartner this week titled Enterprise Mac Clients Remain Limited, but Apple's Appeal is Growing, analysts Michael Silver, Neil MacDonald, Ray Wagner and Brian Prentice, said that administrators will most likely have to prepare for more Mac systems in their environment even though OS X is "not a suitable enterprise wide platform". Ars weighs in on the issue as well.

A white paper published this morning by hardware analysis firm iSuppli, based on its studies of Microsoft Windows Vista running on multiple grades of computer hardware, has concluded that the software publisher's stated minimum requirements for the system - which include an 800 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 35 GB hard drive - may not be nearly enough. "Despite Microsoft's claims that Vista can run on such trailing-edge systems," writes Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms research, "iSuppli believes the reality is quite different."