Central goals for the KDE SC 4.4 release include the introduction of a variety of mobile, online and social networking features, new interface effects and tabbing/snapping in window management and of course many new and improved applications, games and workspace widgets.

This version adds virtualization memory de-duplicacion, a rewrite of the writeback code which provides noticeable performance speedups, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a "perf timechart" tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers.

The lack of malware on Linux may be about to change after a developer admitted he has developed a 'package of malware for Unix/Linux'

Over Thanksgiving, I had to deal with a Windows XP laptop, belonging to a relative, that blue screened during startup. Normal startup failed, as did safe mode, safe mode with command prompt and Last Known Good.

With so much of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) work going straight into the Linux kernel -- thanks in large part to all of the work on memory management and kernel mode-setting -- Kristian proposed that the DRM driver code be removed from the separate DRM Git tree. With this message, Kristian created a new DRM repository that dropped all of the linux-core, bsd-core, and shared-core code.

Devtmpfs, aka 'devfs 2.0' to its detractors, should allow the Linux kernel to start faster and run without udev. Support has been added for ACPI 4.0 and there are two new make targets which generate kernel configurations attuned to the running system. Changes to the power management subsystem increase data throughput and allow better use of runtime power saving features on modern I/O devices.

Desktop astronomy has become more accessible over the last few years as hardware and software have come down in price. For an outlay not much greater than a top of the range PC it is possible to put together a CCD powered telescope that is more than adequate for hunting comets or prospecting for asteroids which are still popular pastimes among amateur astronomers.