It's 2007 and Linux has arrived!

sweetcomputing - by Todd Robinson

"Linux has arrived"...that may sound funny to those who have been using Gnu/Linux for a number of years. But it has finally graduated from a "kit car" with a manual transmission to a full blown production vehicle with automatic everything. If you want, you can still tinker around in the garage or build a custom hot rod as a hobby. But you can also kick back in your limo and enjoy the ride.

The first month of 2007 is nearly complete, but all the hoopla in the computer industry has not been not around the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista. Instead several Gnu/Linux based desktop operating systems are outclassing the long time Desktop Giant, even before it's officially released to the general public.

In fact, Microsoft's Windows Vista, may not even be in the top 5 by the time it's available to the general public.

Lets take a look at the latest rivals:

1. Sabayon Linux has busted on the scene and has taken many - even in the Open Source world - by surprise, including us, here at Sweet! Computing. Graphically it is on par or maybe only slightly ahead of Vista. The desktop is based around a 3D cube that you can rotate from the outside with different Desktops on the 4 sides. And if that wasn't spectacular enough you can also adjust the settings to have yourself inside the cube, giving the impression that you are in a large room with huge application windows open on the walls...much like in the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise uses his finger to operate the computer screen on the wall. And just like in the movie, you can even make the walls transparent. This wonderment of modern design is not really done by Sabayon Linux itself, but by an accelerated desktop window/composite manager known as "Beryl". Sabayon was among the first to incorporate Beryl so cleanly. In fact a main Beryl developer now uses Sabayon on his own computer.

2. PCLinuxOS is a desktop operating system dream come true. Thus far only the beta is out but we've checked it out and it's really sweet! The official release is expected in February. The new version also incorporates Beryl, as many of the newer Gnu/Linux releases will, for all the graphical goodies. For the first time PCLinuxOS will have an "official" release "PCLinuxOS 2007". No longer in beta, we are very excited for folks at PCLinuxOS.


3. Berry Linux may be the best "Unknown" desktop operating system to ever exist. With it's latest release, this virtually unknown powerhouse, leverages the spectacular graphical effects of Beryl, the latest of the most widely used desktop (K Desktop Environment, also used by both PCLinuxOS, and Sabayon), with one of the best supported Linux Distributions, Fedora Core 6, to achieve one of the top performing operating system distributions available today.

4 - 7. Ubuntu. With the release of 6.10 a few months ago the Ubuntu foursome (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu) were the front runners and arguably one of the best desktop operating systems at that time. Still one of the absolute best, but no longer in a class of their own, the Ubuntu desktops are among the best choices available.

CLICK HERE to read the original review of all of these operating systems and learn in detail what makes each of these SO COOL!

powered by performancing firefox