I’ve argued in the past that it was on the womb of Linux where the “App Store” model first kicked, not on the iPhone or the iPad or Symbian. However, sometimes in typical Linux’s fashion it was never given the importance it had, yes people argued some distributions were easier than Microsoft Windows because of it (and they were right) but very few seemed to identified this ingenious feature as potentially revolutionary for the entire world. In the long run, this meant that it was not out of our stadium that the ball first hit the head of consumers, it… Continue Reading

Honoring the net in Netrunner, new applications are always considered in the context of our current world, our cloud connected world. Starting from 13.06 onward Amarok will cease to be Netrunner’s default music player and will superseded by Tomahawk, a relatively new comer to the scene of open source applications developed using the marvelous “Cute” toolkit. Tomahawk’s has one big goal: Merging your local music and your cloud music experience into a single frictionless whole. Let’s dive in. Greetings, pick your favorite web services A breath of fresh air: The very first screen asks you to tick your favorite services, setting them… Continue Reading

How people fulfills its desire to listen to music has changed many times over since humans first banged two bones and discover rhythms. In the last 20 years however the industry has seen massive changes, at a pace never seen before, these changes driven by a booming technology sector and its effects on consumers’ behavior and expectations. When I started using Linux one of the big things people talked about was how amazing Amarok was, and even though I didn’t decide to install Linux because of Amarok it certainly affected my opinion in a positive manner, the idea of improving… Continue Reading

From time to time I get bored of Oxygen, perhaps because it has been mostly the same for a long period now. While Oxygen itself can be tweaked it will never end up looking really that different from how it looks by default (differences will mostly lie in colors). So today we’ll take a look at some alternative widget styles available. You can change the style by going to System Settings > Application Appearance > Style, and to change the window decoration you need to go to System Settings > Workspace Appearance > Window Decorations  . Most styles can be further tweaked by clicking… Continue Reading

Judging by the title you may be wondering if Google’s big idea is to enter the pharmaceutical market or some other activity heavy on chemistry.  Sadly, as attractive as the idea of buying my amoxicillin  straight from Google is, NaCl actually stands for Native Client: Google’s effort to finally bring native-like performance to the web. Unlike Netrunner, or any other Linux distribution or relevant operating system, Chrome doesn’t support running native apps (Chrome itself aside), this severely limits how much can be done in the platform, developers could potentially be trapped between Javascript and Flash as their only choices to develop. A bit of… Continue Reading

KDE’s transition from 3.5.x to 4.x was a traumatic experience for many users, many regressions happen and there’s a general consensus among observers that 4.x was released prematurely, an opinion not shared by some developers that argue they needed feedback and bug reports. Thankfully those times are behind us and I can assure you that the next big revision of KDE will not be traumatic at all, it will be exciting and stuffed with many new features. We will talk about the move to framework 5 and Plasma 2 as they get more mature, but today let’s enjoy a new… Continue Reading

Unity even 2 years and a half after it was introduced remains a contentious feature and source of constant debates. It seems like there’s no middle ground, either people love Unity or hate it. In this sense, and not in many others, Unity is like KDE 4. To better represent how these two compare we will try to explore them like a new user would, starting with KDE followed by Unity. KDE An empty desktop with a cashew and single panel containing a menu button, a system tray and a clock. Seemingly as straightforward as it gets. The only apparently weird… Continue Reading

There’s a simple workaround to use Netflix in Linux, it isn’t perfect or very stable, and according to some it doesn’t always work, still, if you scroll down you can find instructions to install it. Look, I think we all should understand that Linux represents a very small portion of the desktop user base of any product, so we shouldn’t feel entitled to get all services other vastly more popular operating systems are getting, instead we should celebrate when an important service hits Linux, like Steam. One of the best developments to happen to open source, and that Linux users… Continue Reading