At the turn of this decade Miguel de Icaza was the unblemished hero of the free software movement and chief architect and co-creator, with Federica Mena, of the GNOME project, which had come into being as the free software response to KDE. Now de Icaza is regarded with suspicion because of his support for Mono. What happened to bring about this change?

A common complaint about GNOME is that it has a certain fetish for icons. Menu entries, buttons - everything has an icon attached to it which often wastes space needlessly by making buttons larger than they need to be, as well as menus wider than they need to be. The good news (for me, at least) is that the next GNOME release will have all these icons removed.

Gnome system restrictions utility Lockdown Editor lets you create a profile that limits a user to a set of application that a system administrator allows. It has a nice, logically structured GUI that allows administrators to choose and click checkboxes on the options that you want to deny for user access.

One Hundred Paper Cuts is a project which attempts to fix 100 usability errors reported by the users for the new Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

One of the most popular "paper cuts" concerns Nautilus, the default file browser in GNOME. Its graphical interface could be improved a lot: the space currently devoted to the menu / columns is too big and takes away space for the really important stuff.

If I had to name the open source projects with the largest development teams, Gnome and KDE would probably come to mind. After that I read on the LXDE devlopment blog that they rank quite high in the list of active projects on Ohloh.

A roundup of three Linux BitTorrent applications with screenshots and feature list

The GNOME developers, through Lucas Rocha, have announced early this morning in a press release that the last maintenance release of the popular GNOME 2.26 desktop environment is now available for download.