In January of 2008, software code at the heart of GNU/Linux 3D applications was discovered to be non-free—a potential disaster for free software advocates hoping to see advanced graphical acceleration now common on modern operating systems.

Over the past few years, 3-D rendering in window managers has become a new trend in the desktop environment. OS X was the first to make fancy visual effects prominent in the way users interact with the windows in their desktop. Windows Vista has also jumped on the bandwagon with its Aero interface, though it has some performance issues to work out.

This past month has seen a flurry activity from a number of players in the Linux desktop space. Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu, Dell, Lenovo and even Intel white box system builders are getting into the act. Is the year of the Linux desktop finally upon us or is this just another flare up generated by the Linuxworld conference in San Francisco?

Every so often, you read on Slashdot, Digg, or some other techie news site that Linux is finally ready for the desktop. It's finally to the point that any end user could sit down at a computer and happily compute away. The applications are sufficiently sanitized and Windows-like that even Grandma can use them.

By attacking from the bottom, where Microsoft can no longer successfully compete, Linux will finally cut itself a large slice of the desktop

While you can still download many free versions of Linux online, for convenience sake, several vendors offer user-friendly versions and charge a fee for support. Red Hat and Novell are the primary desktop Linux vendors, but another Linux distribution for the desktop is on the rise — and it is completely free.

Can Google save desktop Linux? Or more accurately, can online applications?

gtk-desktop-info is a python tool to display various pieces of information directly on the desktop, using plugins for html rendering, with html templates and css style sheets for formatting.

Google has finally released a long-awaited native Linux application: Google Desktop for Linux. As with the already shipping OS X and Windows versions, Google Desktop enables Linux users to search for text inside documents, local email messages, their Web history, and their Gmail accounts. [...] Google Desktop for Linux is based on Google's own desktop search algorithms.