Not too long back, I highlighted my feelings on KDE, detailing some of its shortcomings and talking about why it’s not necessarily the de facto desktop I’d recommend to people. In this piece, I want to show you that the GNOME desktop has a number of issues that need attention as well. I’ll outline eight areas in GNOME that need to be improved for a better user experience.

Over the last few years, system security has gained a lot of momentum and software professionals are focusing heavily on it. Linux is treated as a highly secure operating system, but the reality is that it too has its share of security flaws…

There's no question that Ubuntu dominates the desktop-Linux world.  With commanding market share and a huge user community, it's by far the most well supported and documented open-source platform in the desktop world.  On servers, however, the situation is different - and Canonical needs to address it if it wants to become a real player in the server market.

Here is LWN's twelfth annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year. 2009 offered few surprises to those that have been following Linux and free software for as long as we have. As expected, there were new releases of many of the tools and underlying infrastructure that we use on a daily basis.

Buck Security comprises a collection of security scans for Debian-based Linux distributions, including Ubuntu. It’s easy to use, and gives you a quick overview of the security status of your system.

Compiz Fusion is the best thing that happened to Linux desktop user experience yet. In the world of Linux bashers who argue that Linux is not quite ready for home users; compiz is one of the few things that really set Linux apart from other OS with major market share.

I agree that Linux is less vulnerable than Windows, but that doesn’t make it immune to attackers. It’s not always about security flaws, buffer overflows or denial of service attacks. I came up with a list of 10 basic rules that should reduce the security risk.

In the Linux desktop world, the graphical user interface is here to stay. Old Unix hands may grumble, but the fact remains that, without all the efforts poured into GNOME, KDE, Xfce and others, Linux would not be as successful as it is today.

Users running Firefox are vulnerable to IE flaws via files supported by Windows Media Player, a researcher shows.