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?

While Windows advocates may smirk and say here we go again, as 2007 draws to a close I get the strong feeling that we may look back upon this year and recognize it with hindsight as the year that the Linux desktop finally arrived. There are a number of events that point to 2007 as being the turning point for Linux and it all started in January with the release of Windows Vista.

We finally got our huge Christmas tree in this year, which means that our house decorations are finally done. That’s great, because now I have time for other important decorations: my Linux box.

Until a few years ago, hardly a day went by without an article being featured on Linux Today about how “the year of Linux” had arrived. Every Linux user with a blog was willing to bet, year after year, that this was finally going to be “the year of Linux.” This was going to be the year when the public got wise, quit paying the Microsoft tax and moved over to the obviously superior Linux.

Just 3 years after Google first released their Jingle extension for Jabber which they used in their GTalk application it is finally possible to use it on the open source desktop too.

"About a year ago, we had spoken with Richard Stallman about the free software movement in Latin America and he said something which was surprising: even though free software was extremely popular in Cuba, it was receiving heavy resistance from Cuban academics and the university system in Cuba. Well, an announcement this week indicates that this has finally changed: ..."

Well it has finally come to pass after long hours and lots of hard work...

The Wine team is proud to announce that Wine 1.0 is now available. This is the first stable release of Wine after 15 years of development and beta testing. Many thanks to everybody who helped us along that long road!

The Gluon project is an open framework for creating and distributing games - supporting the flow of the idea all the way from the author to the player of the finished game using 2D graphics. After long months of hard work, the team is now very proud to announce the release and availability of the Gluon software packages.

Well, we finally kicked Pidgin 2.5.3 out of the nest, two days late. It's spreading its wings and flying.