Jamie A. Watson writes: "I wrote a few days ago about Kubuntu on Netbooks. After a few days of experimentation and discovery, I'm going to continue and expand that topic to the KDE Netbook Desktop in general."

Jack Wallen writes: "Not only is KDE 4.5 a far superior desktop to its predecessor, I would go as far to say that it has finally surpassed 3.5 in both usability and performance. That's a bold statement considering how the desktop has evolved."

I am sure you know, but in case you didn’t – one of the most exciting and long lived desktop Linux distros has rolled out a new release. Yes, Mandriva 2010 Spring is out – and I love it.

Mint 9, aka Isadora, is the latest update to the desktop-focused, Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (10.04). It is one of the more exciting desktop distributions, with a nice selection of custom-developed graphical management utilities.

"The other day I decided to give a try at Funtoo (for those that do not know it yet, a variant of Gentoo). I am very impressed with the improvements that Daniel Robbins has done so far..." —— See also: In 2 days: stable toolchain upgrade ——

Between radical changes and limited functionality, the KDE 4 series got off to a rough start. However, with each release, KDE 4 has improved steadily and silenced more critics. Now, with the 4.4 release, the series has reached first maturity.

Today I testdrived Linux Mint 8 Helena, an Ubuntu-based distribution led by Clem Lefebvre and his team. This Mint edition is based off Ubuntu 9.10.

Bored with brown? Looking for more oomph in your Ubuntu installation? We test the latest release of Linux Mint, the shiny green distro that stands on the shoulders of giants and offers its own unique tools. Read on to find out whether Mint is actually a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu...