Valve recently announced its own shiny Linux distribution, unlike most Linux distributions SteamOS will be targeted to gamers and designed to be used primarily on your television. Gaming has long been a sore spot for the open source community, big budgeted games had very few incentives to port their games into a relatively small platform and it caused the classical vicious circle: Gamers don’t use Linux because most games aren’t available, most games aren’t available because gamers don’t use Linux. The current situation also affects how committed hardware companies are into making good drivers. Valve added Linux support a few… Continue Reading

I think Netrunner’s default music player is absolutely great. Tomahawk offers a very good experience, it has a good interface, it looks modern, it has tons of contextual information and it plugs into the cloud with ease, but one of its defects is that your local collection management isn’t very versatile, a lot of space is used to show images from the artist, then album arts, then songs, and this default hierarchy can’t be modified, and playlist management is good but not Amarok 1.x good. It used to be that Amarok was the king of local collections, that’s no longer the case… Continue Reading

Once upon a time Linux had what I think was the best music player/manager, its name was Amarok and people even brought it up as a way to try convince others to move to Linux, intelligent playlists, auto fetching of cover arts, lyrics, last.fm integration, etc, and it was great. Fast forward a few years (almost a decade to be fair) and now Amarok and all KDE music players seems to be lacking, with KDE 5.0 maybe this is the time to fix it. A cluttered mess. Look at the following picture. Is super cluttered, but what always catches my… Continue Reading

Thank you Ballmer. Thanks to your bright leadership Microsoft is better than it has ever been. Stocks have gone up incredibly in these few days since you announced your retirement, stock holders know about your incredible job so they’re just giving you a few millions as a parting gift. Look, I know it has been a bumpy ride and  running a multinational conglomerate with over 100,000 employees is something I can only begin to imagine. I do think I’m adequate at looking at data and judging software though. Under the command of the now philanthropist Bill Gates, previously known for… Continue Reading

Some of you probably remember the big transition from KDE 3 to KDE 4, if you were not part of the community back then, put your seat belts on because the next version of KDE will be KDE 4’s last major release. Will try to keep you up to date about a new developments or plans (especially, when there’s something user facing we can show you), on this series though I will just complain about stuff I wish gets fixed by the time KDE 5 arrives. Wish 1. Fix System Settings I will beginning by noting that things have improved,… Continue Reading

I’m sure by now all readers know about Canonical’s rather ambitious goal of financing the creation of its own smartphone through crowdfunding. Mark Shuttleworth’s company isn’t playing around either, he doesn’t want just to build a smartphone, he wants to buildthe smartphone meant only for the biggest tech enthusiast out there, using technology that’s cost prohibitive on the consumer space. In order to do manufacture their dreams they’ve estimated they need 32,000,000 dollars. That’s not a small number, in fact, is big enough to break all crowdfunding campaigns to date. Meeting their goal obviously requires a bunch of things to align,… Continue Reading

More precisely, Musk’s Hyperloop OSS transportation. Just in case you don’t know who Elon Musk is let’s start by introducing one of the most amazing innovators and entrepreneurs of our time. Musk is a man who once asked himself: What are the “important problems that would most affect the future of humanity?”. Whatever the conclusion it would define the rest of his life, “one was the Internet, one was clean energy, and one was space”. Co-founder of PayPal, the most popular service to send and receive payments online from all over the world. Co-founder of Tesla Motors (obviously named after one of his… Continue Reading