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There aren't too many changes from the first beta; most of them revolve around the fact that Elementary OS has doubled down on making users follow its predefined workflow and no others.

The KDE edition works extremely well. The Xfce edition has taken a few steps forward, but other things have pushed it a few steps back too.

The 64-bit edition can't play nicely with Skype, and the GNOME edition seems a bit slow and unstable, which shouldn't be the case for a "more polished" update of GNOME. Putting the two together is...not great.

It has been almost exactly a year since I reviewed Zorin OS 6 Core, which was based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin". The new version is based on Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail", so I'm reviewing that now. What is Zorin OS? It is based on Ubuntu, uses a heavily customized GNOME 3 environment with Compiz as the WM and AWN as a panel. It also aims to look as close to Microsoft Windows as possible. It's fast, stable, configures Compiz properly, and has the programs that I need. I can't find much not to like.

Cinnamon is still too unstable, MATE seems to exhibit a little latency, and Compiz appears to be entirely out of whack.

It's surprisingly easier to do than KDE. Unfortunately, this only works for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" and its derivatives, and not any newer versions, so enjoy this while you can!

What is Semplice? It is based on Debian and uses Openbox as its default WM. Unlike #!, which is based on Debian Stable (and issues preview releases based on the future Debian Stable release), Semplice is based on Debian Unstable "Sid", which allows it to be maintained as a rolling-release distribution. It generally works pretty well, though it was a little slow and resource-heavy, which are not characteristics typically found in a Debian-based Openbox distribution.

SolydK is pretty amazing, and so is SolydX. Both are recommendable to newbies.

In the last week of classes, since finished all of my assignments, I have had a little time to do some distribution reviews before starting to prepare for final exams. The second such review is of the KDE edition of Korora 18 "Flo". I have reviewed Korora before. Back then it was called Kororaa (with an extra 'a'), so I guess the name was shortened in a manner similar to that of Facebook (from "TheFacebook"). It's a distribution that essentially offers a bunch of niceties on top of Fedora with GNOME or KDE. This time I tried just the KDE version.

Last year it was pretty darn good, and it has essentially only gotten even better since then.

This is the best iteration of Fuduntu I have seen since it became independent from Fedora, so it is a shame to see this amazing distribution go into that good night.

It worked significantly better than last time and is way more polished. This could be among the first contenders for being an easy to use distribution based on Arch!

It was fast, lean, slick, and did what I needed to do - perfect for work!

Given that there were issues in connecting to the repositories, I can't be too conclusive about Pardus, but it seems like it could be quite good.

It now works as well as Ubuntu-based Linux Mint. The only issues with it are the same issues from GNOME 2 anyway, so I can heartily recommend it to newbies.

It has a couple minor quirks, but all in all, it is an excellent distribution.

It seems to be good for beginner Linux users who may be ready to get their hands a little more dirty. More importantly, though, the Anaconda installer is amazing!

It takes way too many cues from Apple's Mac OS X, which puts me off a bit, but I feel like a lot of other people would like that. Plus, it is put together extremely well.

The GNOME 3/Cinnamon edition is still too unstable. The MATE edition is much better than in version 13 LTS "Maya", and I can now recommend it as much as I was past editions of Linux Mint with GNOME 2.

It generally worked fine, but the unreliability of both Okular and the shutdown process means that better KDE distributions for long-term work use can be found.