So I took the old Netbook I used to test Netrunner on low-end hardware out, this time I wanted to test something entirely different. One of the many propositions by Valve is the idea of a simple Steam Machine, of around $99, that can stream games from your main computer. The idea is you can have your regular tower on your room and stream to your TV using only a small box. Steam, sadly, doesn’t support a Linux host, but it will in the future. To test it I ran a few games from a Windows installation to a Netbook… Continue Reading

KDE is my favourite desktop environment but as everything in this life it’s far from perfect. In this series we will simply check what KDE can learn from other desktop environments, starting by KDE’s longstanding “competitor” GNOME. Similarly there’s stuff GNOME and everybody else could learn from KDE. By the very nature of the topic the article may read too negative regarding KDE, but remember is my favourite desktop environment, the only reason it may read negative is because we’re explicitly talking about the things other environments do better. 1. Consistent and beautiful application design Say what you will about… Continue Reading

Small companies or individuals often have problems raising capital or getting loans and crowdfunding has emerged as the new way for them to get funded. All kind of projects and products from music to smartwatches have gotten the funds they need to make their ideas a reality. Other have failed and yet still managed to raise incredible amounts of money, the biggest example of this being the Ubuntu Edge. It’s fitting that the project that has raised the most money of all crowdfunding campaigns was a project related to free software that also failed.  Despite the hope of some, including… Continue Reading

Epic games is a company known to the public because of its award-winning and popular video games, the most famous of all belong to the Gears of War series for the Xbox 360. PC and old school gamers, however, probably identify them for their iconic series of first person shooters. The last iteration of Unreal Tournament was released on 2007. Traditionally Unreal Tournament games were developed and released to showcase their latest graphic engine and with Unreal Engine 4 some expected a new entry of the classic series. Something way more interesting happened. Unreal Engine 4: quasi open source Let’s… Continue Reading

KDE5 is one of the more important upcoming software packages in the Linux world. There are quite a few reasons why this is the case, and I’d like to emphasize a couple in this opening section. The first, the critical satisfaction factor uncertainty, which comes to bear following the KDE3.5 to KDE4 fiasco. This one has left many a user with a bitter taste, and worse yet, a sense of fear that the familiar and friendly, which they’ve come to love, may be gone in a single moment of binary code fury. The second one is, this is the first… Continue Reading