A pair of stories on /. today hold a particular fascination for me, particularly when taken together:

“Linux Desktop Distro Shootout”

“War Brewing on the Inexpensive Laptop Front”

They point to a pair of stories:

Infoweek: “Linux Shootout: 7 Desktop Distros Compared”.

We tested openSUSE, Ubuntu 8.04, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva Linux One, Fedora, SimplyMEPIS, and CentOS 5.1. All performed well, and each had at least one truly outstanding feature.

(At the moment, I am veering toward Kubuntu.)

And The Christian Science Monitor: “More computer brands chase the ‘$100 laptop’”.

Bye bye, bulk. New lines of tiny PCs fit both in your purse and into third-world classrooms.

Taken together, I can see my near-future computing needs handled, particularly on the writing front.

Ars Technica has the story on the effort by KDE to port a great deal of its environment to run as native* Mac applications: “KDE goes cross-platform with Windows, Mac OS X support”.

More project details as well as torrent files are on the KDE TechBase, here: “Projects/KDE on Mac OS X”.

Mac OS X is already a “desktop environment” in the sense that it provides window management, application launching, etc. The goal of KDE on Mac OS X is to provide the rich frameworks and applications in KDE to a wider audience.

The Installation section of that wiki page notes:

You must install at least Qt, kdesupport, and kdelibs for any of these packages to work. Also, kdepimlibs, kdebase and strigi are recommended since a number of things will want them. (…and it has Konqueror)

Amarok (which I’ve seen a lot of people mentioning they were excited about getting) is “temporarily not building” so isn’t included in the downloads.

* - for certain values of native ;)