If Gnome developers are to be believed, the desktop of the future arrived last week when the release candidate for Gnome 2.30–which could become Gnome 3.0–was made available.  My CPU needed a workout, so I recently compiled the new desktop and gave it a run.  Here’s a look at the desktop environment that–like it or not–may soon be coming to a computer near you.

This year (2010) marks the 10th anniversary of a lot of things: Tuvalu’s entry into the United Nations, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, and the debut of Windows ME, for example. But much more importantly, 2010 marks OpenOffice.org’s tenth year of existence. To celebrate, here’s a look–literally, because there are a lot of screenshots–at how OOo has evolved throughout the decade.

Ubuntu is way easier to install than certain other operating systems.  But it would be even greater if I could select which applications I wanted on my new system before the Ubiquity installer goes about its business–an idea that was proposed recently on Ubuntu Brainstorm.  Here’s why it should go through.

Canonical has launched a new service, dubbed Ubuntu Single Sign On. The effort seeks to simplify and unify all login services for all Ubuntu-related sites. Sound like a good idea? Here’s the deal…

If you’re like me, you don’t put much thought into where your multimedia codecs come from: you run a quick “apt-get install gstreamer-plugins-ugly” on new installs and move on to more important things.  But not everyone’s like me, and as Ubuntu moves increasingly into government and the workplace, patent and licensing issues are becoming more and more important for many Ubuntu users.

Canonical is making multiple moves to engage and energize Ubuntu software developers. The latest example involves Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, scheduled for March 1 to 6, 2010. Here are some quick details plus the implications for Ubuntu in business.

These days–in contrast to ten years ago–the world has plenty more Web browsers than it needs. And yet I can’t find one I’m happy with. My continuing search for a browser I get along with led me recently to try Opera, a seasoned but still largely obscure player on the browser scene. Here’s what I thought of it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about five features that make Ubuntu so much more enjoyable to use than certain less-Free operating systems. The comments on that post got me thinking about several other great features that I didn’t mention. So to give those their due, here’s a second list of five things Ubuntu does that I couldn’t live without.

I’ve long heard good things about Ubuntu Tweak, but never used it myself.  With the recent appearance of its 0.5 release, however, I decided to give it a go.  Here’s what I thought.

Last spring, the world changed forever when VirtualBox implemented support for 3D acceleration in Windows and Linux guests.  I have a tendency to be behind the curve on world-changing events, so I didn’t found time to play with this new feature until a few days ago.  But what I found made me really happy.  Read on for the details.