An interesting Slashdot article points out that as the price of hardware falls the “Windows tax” (the price of Windows) will become more obvious to the average user, potentially convincing them to move to Linux or another free alternative. It is true that as hardware prices fall the “Windows tax” will become a bigger percentage of the cost of a PC, but currently this will not be apparent at all to the average user in most cases. If PC makers make it clear how much you are paying and let you switch to Linux as one of the options, then I think this article is exactly right.

Some of you may have noticed that this week has been very distro heavy, so here is another distro-related story.

Linux Mint is a very popular derivative of Ubuntu. Recently, Linux Mint 3.1 Celena has been released. If you are curious what is new, you should check out Softpedia’s excellent article about the new release. The article walks through many new features as well as some old features of Linux Mint from the Live CD to the installed distro. Included in the new features is a graphical xorg.conf editor for configuring monitors. Nice! Now I just want a good menu.lst (the config file for GRUB) editor that will do the work for me.

With the release of Mandriva 2008 coming up soon (more coverage when released) you may be curious what will be new. Well, here is the answer. I only disagree on one point with the author. I love that orange theme.

Other then that the things I find most interesting are GNOME 2.20 (see previous post) and the inclusion of Compiz Fusion.

Mandriva 2007’s Orange Look

The approved feature list for Fedora 8 is now avaliable here. Fedora 8 is the upcoming release of the Fedora distribution. Among the features in the list are better ways to get codecs required to play some media, a slick new GNOME theme, the inclusion of Power Top, an application designed to tell what is using the power a computer is consuming, and many under-the-hood changes. You can expect lots of coverage of Fedora 8 when it is released.

I am sure many of you have seen stories like this about some business switching to Ubuntu and saving a ton of money, but the reason why this got my attention is that I have been noticing recently that Ubuntu really seems smoother then other Linux distros. I am sure many of you will disagree, but I now see why everyone calls it the best distro for newbies. Granted, there are many other newbie-friendly distros, but Ubuntu really seems to just work. Some things that really stand out to me (not that I am saying these features are specific to Ubuntu) are the Add/Remove programs application being the obvious package manager and the more advanced version which controls individual packages hidden in the System menu, the restricted drivers manager making it easy to use non-free drivers easily, and just generally the hardware support.

This InformationWeek Article makes a very good point about Linux and success. Many people seem to believe that in order for Linux to “win” or “succeed” it needs to “beat” Windows and OS X, but does it? Has Linux not yet succeeded? It sure does not look that way.

I agree with the article that Linux does not need to “beat” Windows. I just need to be the best solution out there for some people. Also, how do we know that if Linux was put under the same amount of strain hackers put on Windows it would remain virus-free? I am not saying that Linux is in-secure or that Windows is, I am just saying that it is incredibly hard to prevent hackers once they decide that want to do something.

The GNOME team recently announced GNOME 2.20. Although I knew this was a major milestone I expected that most changes would be under the hood (as the author of the article did), but it turns out that there are really a number of new features. Some of the things seem like features that just make the whole GNOME desktop smoother, but others seem like potentially very useful tools. (I am talking about the screen saver thing.) I don’t want to spoil the article (don’t worry it is not too long), so I will not say anymore.

Linux.com Article

The first open-source Linux driver for the AMD Radeon. This driver comes out of AMD working with Novell. The current driver is intended for development use, not general usage.

The decision has finally been made, the next release of Ubuntu, codenamed Gusty Gibbon, will ship with Compiz Fusion installed and enabled by default. Compiz Fusion is a program that provides cool and useful 3D effects. Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon is scheduled for release in October of this year.

If you have been watching the tech news recently you know that Apple released new iPods, but this time they made some changes to the song database that breaks compatibility (and needs more then small tweeks) with the current Linux iTunes replacement software. The good news is that you can bet it will not be long before the open-source community figures it out.

Great blog post containing more details.