"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."

Microsoft on Thursday released to manufacturing Exchange Server 2007, a product developers say they 'bet the company on'. According to Exchange team lead Terry Myerson, Microsoft has 120,000 mailboxes running on Exchange 2007, with 200 partners utilizing the software for another 55000. Acting as a unified messaging server, Exchange 2007 handles e-mail, calendaring, faxes and even voicemail.

Today, Nintendo released its Wii console in Europe and the UK, meaning the launch is now complete. The Inq has a set of photos of the device, comparing it to the Xbox 360, while El Reg has a review of the oddball among the new game consoles.

Freespire 2.0 Alpha2 (1.1.73) is now available for download. "Merged Upstart boot scripts, improved boot time noticed; updated ATI Drivers to current version; enhanced Nvidia support; added knetworkmanager; and much more."

A shadowy organization called Larrabee Development Group has set a most ambitious goal: unseating AMD/ATI and Nvidia as the largest producers of high-end graphics chips. And it might just succeed. It may seem unfathomable for an unknown such as Larrabee to knock off two of the most powerful processor companies. That is until you realize that Larrabee is little more than a weak disguise for Intel. The chip giant has, in fact, ramped up its graphics efforts in recent weeks to create a product code-named Larrabee theoretically capable of besting AMD and Nvidia's best kit.

The holiday season hasn't gone exactly as Microsoft had hoped and Ballmer sits down with CNET News.com to discuss life after Vista, battling the iPod, and the rising importance of mobile devices.

The third installment in the Leopard Technology Series for Developers provides an overview of Leopard's application technologies: Time Machine, iChat Theater, the Instant Message Framework, the Calendar Store, the Ruby and Python Cocoa bridges, the new Scripting Bridge, Core Animation and 64-bit GUIs.