Stories by: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

If you've read many of my articles over the past 20 years, you may have noticed that I don't care for Microsoft or its products. That isn't because I think open-source software or Apple products are unbeatably great. It's because Microsoft's products are usually awful.

There are more interesting Linux desktop distributions to choose from than ever before. However, if you're looking for major distros with a great deal of support, you'll want to look at the big four: Fedora, Mint, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.

It used to be that when I said "Cloud services," people's eyes would glaze over and in minutes they'd be gently snoring. That was then. This is now. While CIOs and CTOs still debate about what role the Cloud will have in business, personal Cloud services have been slowly easing their way into almost everyone's computing plans.

For decades now, we've been fussing about operating systems. "Mac OS X is better than Windows!" "Why upgrade to Windows 7 when XP works just fine?" "You're all wrong. Linux rules." Such arguments are about to become history.

We're finding out all sorts of things about Steve Jobs now that he's left us. For example, he wanted to crush Android because it was "stealing" from him. That's funny, considering that one of Jobs' pet phrases was "Good artists copy; great artists steal." He knew what he was talking about, since much of Apple's early success can be ascribed to his "theft" of the mouse and GUI from Xerox. We've also learned that his next big idea was to transform the living room with Apple TV sets . That's all well and good, but Jobs is gone now. What should Apple do next?

You know me. I'm a Linux guy. Still, I think Windows has gone from being a bad joke of a desktop operating system (Windows ME) to being a reasonable choice (Windows 7). Its course hasn't been steady, though: After the still popular XP SP3 , we got Vista . And now we have Windows 8. What the heck is Steve Ballmer thinking?

No sooner did Steve Jobs announce that he was stepping down as Apple's CEO then a swarm of stories appeared singing his praises. Fair enough. Other stories pointed out that Jobs made mistakes. OK, I can see that too. What I don't get is all the people who are saying that Jobs wasn't that important. That is so wrong. If we could step into a parallel world without Jobs, I doubt you'd recognize it.

OK, we all know that people want to bring their consumer technology into the office. In particular, though, people really want to use tablets in the workplace.

When the popular Web site Gawker was hacked into recently, more than a million user IDs and passwords were released. If you were one of the people compromised that's annoying -- very annoying. Not that it's a big deal that someone could log into a gossip site under your name. But many of those people used those same IDs and passwords on other sites that are a wee bit more important, such as LinkedIn. Now, that's a problem.

Would you like to do your Web browsing while keeping a constant eye on what your Facebook friends are doing? If so, then RockMelt is for you.