I've had a couple of very pleasant surprises with the Netbook Remix of the Lucid Release Candidate this weeend.

So now that Fedora 13 Alpha is out…. have you given it a try? What do you think about the wallpaper? We want to hear your feedback, because there isn’t actually that much time to update the wallpaper for beta.

As I continue to test and work with Ubuntu, I have come across a few more very pleasant surprises:

The Guardian is not always known for it's unbiased opinion when it comes to OS reviews. There is a pleasant surprise for us free software users in this review however which compares Ubuntu 9.10 (out 29 Oct) and Windows 7. A balanced and well approached review. Worth a read.

One of the arguments I often hear from people who are trying to use linux for the first time is that they are not sure if they can switch back to their original choice of OS (usually windows), if they are not satisfied with their experience with linux.

I hear this too often - Windows is easier to use than Linux. And so in light of this, being as I have used both operating systems for years, I thought I would put this to the test, the results are not going to make Windows users feel too good about this desktop choice overall, I'm afraid.

Boxee, the popular media center application, is now in public beta following an extensive pre-beta period. The new release comes for OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu.

I turned on my laptop running the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid beta (I think we're still technically on "beta 2") and found more than 100 updates ready for me. When I rebooted, I noticed that the button order on application windows changed — again.

If you find that running Windows makes a GRUB 2-based system unbootable (Debian bug, Ubuntu bug), then I'd like to hear from you. This is a bug in which some proprietary Windows-based software overwrites particular sectors in the gap between the master boot record and the first partition.