Ubuntu is getting touch support, but it's for smartphones.

After teasing the web community with a countdown timer to its secret touch reveal, Canonical on Wednesday spilled the beans about what's coming next for Ubuntu: smartphones. Like Windows 8, Ubuntu is trending towards a single operating system for multiple devices, though not necessarily with identical interfaces. In fact, Ubuntu for smartphones will sport a "distinctive" interface that makes use of all four edges of the screen for a more immersive experience.

Despite the hype, Windows 8's adoption rate is slower than of Vista's when it debuted five years ago.

If you listen to Microsoft, Windows 8 is not only the greatest operating system ever designed, it's also selling really well. Microsoft in November claimed it sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses in the first month, an impressive figure, even after you factor in all the OEM systems that come pre-loaded with Windows. But is Windows 8 truly off to a fast start? There's evidence to suggest that might not be the case.

As Jelly Bean increases its footprint, the vast majority of Android users are still rocking early builds of the open source OS.

It appears Google's latest major version of Android is getting off to a relatively quick start, at least compared to prior versions. With another month in the books, Android 4.1 and 4.2 (Jelly Bean) now collectively account for 6.7 percent of all active Android devices, which are devices that have accessed Google Play within a 14-day period, according to Google's Android Developer channel.

Give Dell credit for wading into open source waters with "Project Sputnik," a pilot program to build a developer solution based on Ubuntu 12.04LTS. After six months of exploration and feedback from testers, Project Sputnik has now landed and is renamed Dell XPS 13 Laptop, Developer Edition. It's a thin and light 13.3-inch Ultrabook powered by Intel's Core i7 3517U processor and driven by Ubuntu, though you could potentially end up paying more versus a similarly spec'd Windows 7 model (with slower processor) or Windows 8 model (with half the storage space). Let's look at the hardware.