If you thought microblogging using Twitter and Identica was as simple as tapping out 140 characters once a day describing what kind of food you just ate, you'd be wrong. In fact, there's a huge amount of functionality to help you follow and be followed online, and if you're a Linux user you're spoiled for choice.

So, we spent some time wading through the collection of available apps, put them all through their paces, and wrote up our results below - read on!

For the tinkerers and testers, 2010 is shaping up to be a perfect year. Almost every desktop and application we can think of is going to have a major release, and while release dates and roadmaps always have to be taken with a pinch of salt, many of these projects have built technology and enhancements you can play with now. We've selected the few we think are worth keeping an eye on and that can be installed easily, but Linux is littered with applications that are evolving all the time, so we've also tried to guess what the next big things might be.

Take a trip with us on a voyage of discovery to find out exactly what's happening and how the Linux desktop experience is likely to evolve over the next 12 months...

Previously we gave you 7 Cool Linux Projects that anyone could do, but if you still have a few hours to kill and you've already watched the latest Maru videos on YouTube, we have the perfect follow-up article for you: read on to discover just how versatile Linux is by trying nine easy projects that should take no longer than the kettle does to boil - learn how to run your own wiki, encrypt files, blog from home, create your own network wormhole and more!

We're all set to put our feet up and wait for Santa to deliver nice presents, but before we do that we have a present for you: an all-encompassing Emacs tutorial that takes you from getting started all the way through customisation and how to use it for different purposes. So, if you're looking for something to do to give you an excuse to avoid festivities around the Christmas tree, read on. And regardless of whether Emacs is your thing or not, we wish you a very merry Christmas and an awesome, Linux-flavoured new year!

Collecting things is human nature. The things we collect change over time, but the process never stops. It was cuts and bruises when you were seven, cards when you were a teen and, although no one will admit it, those sweet wrappers with the free tattoos made an appearance somewhere too.

That's where collection mangers come in. These days, most are equipped with a slick GUI that can pull information from the internet to help you with cataloguing your collection. Moreover, they'll often enable you to tag the items in your collections, search through your stuff and even export the information to another system.

After conquering the desktop virtualisation space on the Mac, Parallels has decided to take the fight to VMware with a client for Windows and Linux desktops. But unlike the bi-polar world of the Mac (with Parallels and VMware being the only options), Parallels faces a multi-pronged attack on Linux, from proprietary brethren like VMware's Workstation, and free-to-download options such as Sun's VirtualBox.

So, what does Parallels Desktop 4 for Linux (let's just call it PD4) have over the competition? Here's the low down...

War. In our world, people get into conflicts about all sorts of matters, from religion and belief through to money and oil. And, in the Linux world, tensions can build up and overspill into flame wars on many subjects too. The most popular of these is text editors - yes, the KDE vs GNOME and GPL vs BSD arguments rage on, but the infamous combat between Emacs and Vi predates most arguments you'll see, and is just as heated today.

Nine years ago, Linux Format magazine printed a group test of the best text editors. We sent a red-shirted colleague down - deep below LXF Towers, way under the execute gym complex, far beneath Nick Veitch's cave, and down on into the archives - where we dug up that group test just for you. So, if you've already read the best distros of 2000 and the best window managers of 2000, read on for more historical Linux goodness...

We've reviewed Scribus a number of times in the past and even included a feature made using the tool in one of the back issues of Linux Format magazine. However, each revisit tends to throw up the same old problems: Scribus's lack of reliability and poor interface. Thankfully, after two years of solid development, these woes have been banished. Well, mostly - read on to find out what's changed...

With HomeBank you can automate recurring transactions, set reminders for future transactions, assess your future account balance so you can plan your spending sprees and manage your expenses expertly. You see, we work hard for our pay cheques - well, some of us work harder than others - and we spend money on groceries, utilities and, ahem, fun Fridays. But keeping track of what's coming in, when the bills are due and how much is left after the recurring monthly expenses is not something that many of us make the effort to do. It's time-consuming and boring and there's always that episode of 24 that you'd rather be watching.

If you take the time to master some good home accounts software - such as HomeBank or one of the other great apps we featured in our home finance software group test - you'll find these accounting chores much less painful. Read on!

Regular readers will no doubt remember our LaTeX made easy tutorial on the Latex typesetting application. But although Latex is a hugely powerful piece of software, getting to grips with it can be a real headache if you'd rather just sit down and get to work.

Luckily, that's where Lyx comes in: if Latex has a steep learning curve, Lyx is the cable car that whisks you two thirds of the way up the mountain so you can enjoy the views without having to break a sweat. And just as web editors can create websites without you needing to know HTML, Lyx is able to prepare documents for typesetting without getting too involved in all the intricacies of Latex.

If you enjoyed our other Made Easy tutorials, try this one for size!

So you've got those expensive headphones you always wanted. You put them on, set your playlist on shuffle, lean back on the recliner, and hit play. And Robbie Williams sounds just as bad as he did on the older cheapo headphones. What gives? Unless you aren't a Robbie fan, the music doesn't sound great because it isn't encoded to.

If you've already read MythTV made easy and want to take your media knowledge to the next level, read on for our guide to audio conversion with FFmpeg, Mplayer, HandBrake and more...

As long as NTFS partitions continue to sprawl over heterogeneous networks, anti-virus companies will dole out scanners for Linux. No surprise then that AVG Technologies, makers of the popular AVG Anti-Virus, has a scanner that runs on Linux in its latest 8.5 series bouquet.

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.5 for Linux (hereafter abbreviated to AVG Free) isn't AVG's first scanner for Linux. The company has released binaries for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures for Linux and FreeBSD, and the scanner itself is loaded with features up to the brim. Despite all this, it is utterly useless for the intended audience.

Screencasts - digital movies with the desktop as a backdrop, the mouse as the protagonist and a voiceover - have become an integral part of electronic learning and form the basis of the computer-based training industry. As bandwidth becomes affordable and video-sharing websites start popping up, there's a huge influx of free and open source tools.

Not all tools follow the same methodology of capturing activity on your screen. Some rely on desktop sharing services such as VNC, some take a series of screenshots in quick succession and stitch them together into a video. Some give you the option to select an output format, and some will spew the video in patent-free formats only. Using these tools you can screencast your complete desktop or a particular window. Some enable you to narrate audio along with your videos and others don't.

Which to choose? Read on for our group test of the best screencasting apps available for Linux...

Organising your digital music collection can be a Herculean effort. Yet when you have several gigabytes of tracks to sift through, your only chance of finding what you want to hear is if your music files are properly tagged.

Don't panic if your machine can't tell Barry White apart from the White Stripes, though: the creators of Picard feel your pain. That's why, by the time Picard is finished with your music collection, each file will know the album it belongs to, the artist who performed it, its track number within the album and a host of other details.

Ever had one of those situations where you pause for a moment, think back to a time long ago, and say, I wish I knew this back then? Even if you haven't, Trickle will trigger many such memories. With Trickle you can control the upload and download speeds for applications such that no single application hogs all the bandwidth. This gives you the power to ensure that downloads from Firefox don't interfere with your attempts to download a file through FTP.

Free software is often developed with the mantra 'release early, release often'. This is a great idea, because new tools can be tested, trialled and critiqued as they're developed, rather than waiting for some arbitrary point of readiness.

Which brings us to KOffice 2.0, the latest productivity package designed specifically for KDE. Like the completely rewritten KDE 4 release, KOffice 2.0 has been let loose in a state that isn't quite ready for production use. Read on for our views of the new release from the KOffice camp...

Geotagging photographs makes it possible to give your computer orders like “show me on a map where this picture was taken” or “find all my pictures taken within a three-mile radius of Buckingham Palace”. If you want to publish your pictures online, geotagging makes it possible to make your own maps hyperlinked to and from your online picture galleries or services like Flickr.

Digital cameras with integrated GPS sensors that automatically geotag every shot will become more and more affordable over the next few months, but that doesn't mean that there's no reason to learn how to do it yourself. Think about it for a moment: if you like the possibilities of geotagged pictures, the biggest obstacle you're likely to face is not the shots you'll take from your next holiday, but the thousands of pictures you have on your hard disk already. We're going to help fix that...

Computer-based project management and planning (PM for short) is a strange beast. Real geeks love to hate it: "What planning and deadlines? We'll release when it's ready!" PM, however, is vital in all large organisations and remains one of the reasons that keeps many desktop users locked into their old proprietary operating system - Microsoft Project does after all, run only on Microsoft Windows.

Don't despair, however. If you were suffering in silence because you thought you couldn't draw a Gantt chart or an RBS diagram on Linux, you were wrong. In this article we'll present five project managers that are aimed at non-geek desktop users. They're all programs that can work without an internet connection or relying on external servers, so their installation is really easy, even if they aren't already included in your preferred Linux distro.

Reviewed: Linux isn't short of a few integrated development environments, but if your chosen development arena happens to be Qt, and/or KDE, the only viable option for the last eleven years has been KDevelop. KDevelop is a powerful application that supports many more languages than just C++, but the bewildering array of icons, panels, tabs, menus and windows are likely to scare beginners back to Blitz Basic.

There's a new version of KDevelop on the horizon, but Nokia has beaten them to the punch with Qt Creator, which comes included in the latest release of Qt 4.5 - that's the one with the LGPL licence.

If you find yourself frequently launching terminal windows to Get Stuff Done, you should by now have discovered Guake - a drop-down, always-on terminal for Gnome (screenshots).

We usually set F12 to display/hide the terminal, which means multi-tabbed command-line power is only a keypress away. What's more, a new version has just been announced, so download Guake 0.4.0 today!

PS: KDE users - has YaKuake been replaced by something else now?