This Ubuntu application adds actions to the corners of the screen in GNOME, such as switching virtual desktops and controlling the volume. You can even enable the screensaver and control the screen brightness on your laptop.

Enter Audacious, a fork of the similarly-fated Beep Media Player. It works with Winamp Classic skins, satisfying my inner Microsoft fanboy. It can play back MP3 plus a slew of other formats. It's got a little bit of effects processing, some Last.FM support, and a whole lot of visualization plugins (like Paranormal!). Install this player, young grasshopper, and go terrorize ShoutCast with your listenership.

Until recently I thought Linux was just the domain of enthusiasts and cost-conscious corporates, who for whatever reason, wanted an alternative to Windows. I never thought Linux had a contribution to make to mainstream computing. However, after purchasing a ASUS EeePC, a Linux based subnotebook, I’ve realised that I was wrong, very wrong.

In the tech world this phenomenon is known as “software bloat” or “feature bloat.” It's a well-documented problem and a frequent complaint about Windows OSs—Vista in particular. In addition to being buggy, the extra features tend to bog down your system by demanding more processing power and memory. Computer-makers: Don't load up operating systems with features and then make us sweat to figure out how to get rid of the fat.

Ever wish you had your whole desktop on a flash disk? You know what we mean, you take a spreadsheet up to your 'rents, and you realize that they have no program to actually open your spreadsheet with. Or maybe you hop from computer to computer in several offices, and hate the fact that every computer you work on is just different enough to make it difficult to get things done.

Qtractor is an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application for Linux, written in C++ around the Qt4 toolkit. It is still in some alpha stage of development, but already functional.

The latest figures from French based Internet traffic analyst XiTiMonitor shows that the Mozilla's Firefox web browser has continued to take market share off Microsoft's Internet Explorer across the globe over the past year, with a significant spike in Firefox usage in December 2007.