Google recently released its first Google laptop. It took the world by surprise, while there was a leak a few days before the device was still far from confirmed and even further from expected. ChromeOS is used in many low-end laptops, Chromebooks have pretty much become the successors of netbooks. However, the Pixel is different: instead of being akin to netbooks it’s more like a high-end ultrabook, a new category of its own. I’ve argued before that Linux has yet to have a significant impact in the desktop operating system market not because it traces behind in any significant way technologically… Continue Reading

A couple of days ago a very close friend of mine committed a terrible mistake: He formatted all of his drive when he was trying to install Linux. Soon he was consumed by despair as the installation failed and he was left with no operating system and just an empty option in the boot menu labeled “Windows 7”, a misleading entry merely pointing out to Windows’s 100 MB recovery partition. Not a single personal file survived, all of his music, documents and pictures were now lost. In his desperation he booted into Linux again using his live CD and more… Continue Reading

Sometimes apparently simple things turn out to be a little bit harder than expected, among those is usually the use of USB wireless adapters. Everyone in the community will always recommend you to check, when you’re about to buy new hardware, if it works out of the box with Netrunner. While that’s undoubtedly a wise advice is clearly meant for people who already use Netrunner, newcomers don’t buy new hardware to test it (at least not the majority of them) they just install it in the current PC. So if you have a D-Link Wireless N150 USD adapter (dwa-125) and you’re… Continue Reading

I’ll confess something: I like docks. Am I weird? I don’t know, although if the three most popular operating systems in the world are any indicative the answer is no. In the last two years Canonical created Unity, which includes a dock-taskbar hybrid, and Microsoft followed suite, and then Gnome 3, and almost all other Desktop Environments have some sort of dock. Needless to say, Apple uses a dock in Mac OS X. But not KDE. While reproducing Microsoft’s hybrid taskbar is as easy as pie finding a dock is rather hard. Not to sound negative, what they’ve done is… Continue Reading

Linux has yet to achieve a significant piece of the PC market, unlike what it has done in the mobile space. So the question is why doesn’t it happen in the PC industry? Some people argue that Linux is too hard, or that it doesn’t have all the apps people need or all the games or what have you, they will quickly point out that there’s no Photoshop, or Premiere, or Skyrim. But is that true? Is that the reason? That seems unlikely considering how small is the percentage of users that actually care about any of those apps, for… Continue Reading

Is probably no mystery by now that I follow the mobile industry closely so I was naturally very excited when Ubuntu for phones was announced back when the year was one day old. Much has been said in those days, mostly about what a fierce path is ahead of Canonical if they want to impact in any significant way the market and while I have a lot to say about that I rather write today about something happier, namely that Ubuntu for phones has done what Apple and Google couldn’t: Designing a button-less touch interface. Before getting into the praise… Continue Reading

If you’ve been using Linux long enough there’s a phrase you’ve certainly read or heard in some forums, or discussions, or comments: I use Linux for everything, but I keep Windows for gaming. In fact, if you’re a gamer you’ve probably said this yourself. Because while Wine supports running many games, sometimes with even higher performance than doing it on Windows, which is a quite something, there are games that simply do not run under Wine. For example, you may like Gears of War and you may have even bought this game before installing Netrunner, perhaps before even knowing about… Continue Reading

Richard Stallman has many times argued that Open Source Software (OSS) merely refers to a model of software development, while Free Software refers to a social movement. I don’t tend to agree with Stallman, and I tend to side with the people that care about Open Source as an efficient way to develop software. But regardless of whether you think closed source software is immoral (as Stallman does) or not (like myself), there are things about how the (F)OSS community manages their projects that are not just efficient, or moral, but plainly and objectively superior to the way we handle… Continue Reading