With the release of the KDE 4.3 beta, the project is returning to incremental releases, and concentrating on customization and ease of use on the desktop, the panel, and system settings.

The first bugfix-release of xfce 4.6 has been released. We have been able to fix several issues during the past few weeks.

The implementation of the X suite allows for the creation of a wide variety of graphical window managers. Although there is a great website that documents the wide array of window managers both large and small called xwinman lets take a look at window managers roughly in order of appearance.

A few years ago, Xfce had a reputation as a lightweight desktop that made few concessions to inexperienced users. However, the Xfce 4 series of releases have shown steady improvements in usability, and version 4.6 is no exception.

I run across people that get confused as to what a GUI is. Of course a GUI stands for Graphical User Interface and can be applied several ways and methods, but I want to focus on 3 things for this post... The 3 I want to hit on are Xorg, Desktop Environment and Window Manager.

If you’re in a dilemma, just use this post which quickly describes some of the most popular (though not all) desktop environments and window managers. The desktop environments and WMs listed here can easily be downloaded from your distribution’s respective package management system (type “apt-get fluxbox” in your terminal to get fluxbox with apt, for instance).

Picture this: It's late at night. You've restarted your computer. The optical drive is whirring contentedly, but you have butterflies in your stomach. Tonight is the night you install Linux for the first time.