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.

Have you ever thought of your friends and family as sharing traits with an Ultrabook? Neither have we, but Acer hopes you'll be willing to entertain the idea for a chance to win a thin and light Aspire S7 Ultrabook with Windows 8. It's part of a Facebook contest (one that we're in no way affiliated with, but figured we'd give you a heads up) in which you can enter to win a new laptop daily through December 31, 2012.

Lenovo claims its newly unveiled IdeaCentre Q190 is the world's smallest full-function desktop PC. Before anyone asks, the answer is no, it can't run Crysis (not in all its glory, anyway), but it does measure a scant 0.86 inches (22mm) wide, which is still big enough to accommodate an Intel Ivy Bridge foundation, Blu-ray drive, up to 8GB of system memory, and up to 1TB of storage flanked by up to 24GB of SSD cache.

Maingear, a boutique system builder based out of New Jersey, has taken aim at gaming on the go with its new Nomad 15 gaming laptop. Available in a variety of color options, the customizable Nomad 15 is, as its name implies, a 15-inch notebook equipped that features 3rd Generation Intel Core i7 processor options (Ivy Bridge), discrete graphics (GeForce GTX 670MX and up), and up to 32GB of system memory.