earthweb.com: Nobody questions whether Mac OS X is ready for the desktop. With GNU/Linux, however, the story is different. For over a decade, columnists and bloggers have been explaining how GNU/Linux isn't ready for the desktop -- and, despite all the progress in the operating system over the last ten years, the arguments haven't changed much.

extremetech.com: A long time ago I used to actually use a separate computer to install and test Linux distributions. I even built some of the boxes that I used to do the testing. These days I use VMWare and Parallels to run Linux on my Macs. Why?

internetling.com: I got some very interesting comments on my post about Linux projects that need more attention, so I decided to feature a few of the readers’ recommendations.

techtarget.com: Backing up Linux machines can be challenging, especially for storage/backup administrators who are used to working primarily with Windows.

newsfactor.com: Cloudera is releasing a Linux distro for Hadoop, the cloud-computing technology behind Facebook, Google and others. Cloudera's Hadoop is aimed at regular enterprise data centers.

blogs.techrepublic.com: Vincent Danen takes a look at Ubuntu’s Upstart system, which is an event-based replacement for SysV init that handles the starting of tasks and services during boot.

informationarchitects.jp: In January 2000, T-Online asked us what we’d do if we could design a browser from scratch. Our answer was “Tabs”. Eight years later Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, asked me what I think a new tab should look like. The answer after days of mailing back and forth: “Forget tabs!”

dedoimedo.com: Firefox is my favorite browser. It is fast, stable and extensible. It is also quite safe. And it looks good, too. Finally, you may also have heard that Firefox 3.1, the latest version of this phenomenal browser is coming out soon.

news.softpedia.com: On March 10th, Mandriva announced the immediate availability of Mandriva Linux 2009.1 RC1. Though a bit late, we thought it would be nice to please some of our readers and offer them a visual tour of this first release candidate.

polishlinux.org: Are you tired of frequent seeking or all these mega-piles of CDs constantly growing on your desktop? Is there any place left out there? Do you really need to wait another six months to update your software or get the feature you expect?

blogs.techrepublic.com: To take advantage of the excellent Linux development environment, you need to have the right tools. Here’s a rundown of some of the best ones out there and the features they have to offer.

news.cnet.com: Mozilla had planned to release its new "Shiretoko" version of Firefox in early 2009, but with the scale of changes made to the open-source browser, a date halfway through the year now looks more realistic.

qa-rockstar.livejournal: One interesting fact came out of yesterday's Intel KMS Test Day. Everyone noticed that glxgears is much slower under KMS/DRI2 than it was before (e.g. in Fedora 9 or 10)

arstechnica.com: GNOME Do is an open source launcher utility for the Linux desktop. Its new dock interface combines Mac-like polish and usability with highly efficient keyboard control, and we put it through its paces.

h-online.com: On Thursday night, Linus Torvalds released an eighth pre-release version of Linux 2.6.29 and hinted that this could be the final 2.6.29 release candidate. "What's coming in 2.6.29" series with an overview of driver news from a range of areas.

raiden.net: My first thought here's yet another Ubuntu dirivitive how many more can there be? Then wait a minute what's this?

techradar.com: Ah, Usenet newsgroups… Online communication and file sharing for the masses, still equal today to what it was before the advent of blogs, instant messaging and P2P networks.

phoronix.com: Late last month we looked at the Intel X25-E Extreme SSD on Linux. We ran this high-performance solid-state drive within a System76 Serval Notebook and compared its performance to a Seagate Momentus 7200.2 SATA HDD.

This week in DistroWatch Weekly:

• Tutorial: Installing Linux with Logical Volume Management

• News: Slackware switches to KDE 4, Ubuntu packages Plymouth, openSUSE resurrects broken download server, Debian overviews 'Squeeze', Tiny Core reveals 10 MB desktop distro, best window managers of 2000
• Released last week: PCLinuxOS 2009.1, Tiny Core Linux 1.2
• Upcoming releases: OpenBSD 4.5 pre-orders, Frugalware Linux 1.0
• New additions: moonOS
• New distributions: ARAnyM/AFROS Live CD, FuguIta, Jarro Negro Linux, Livre S.O.
• Reader comments

Read more in this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly....

toolbox.com/blogs: Changing from closed source programs to open source programs is a hard thing to do. Many people will resist that change fiercely and will pull every trick out of the book to justify their objections to that change.