I just watched a short talk on Ubuntu Linux given by Mark Shuttleworth. Ubuntu is the distro of Linux I have run for the last year or two. Quite an amazing talk, really. You can watch the whole thing here. He is quite a fascinating figure, but more fascinating is how clear his explanation of the Debian-Ubuntu relationship is.
If Ubuntu reaches the level that Mark hopes it will, it will truly be an amazing distribution. And I had never known about the other things Ubuntu works on, like Bazaar-NG, which allows distributed revision control (probably one of the coolest concepts in Open Source I’ve heard of in awhile). Rosetta is another one of those projects, which is a very cool web-based system for allowing translation of free software projects.
It’s an interesting time to be tracking desktop OSS indeed.