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

Until about a year ago, I considered the Xfce desktop to be boring and bland and not that beautiful. I never thought it could be a decent contender for the likes of KDE and Gnome. Then, one day everything changed. It was the day Gnome 3 was born, and I figured that my favorite choice for the desktop environment was gone now, living in the shadows. While a few distributions still cling to the good ole Gnome 2, and there’s the MATE reincarnation, the landscape has been forever changed. Instability breeds opportunity, and into the vacuum came Xfce, trying to… Continue Reading

Normally, at the end of the year, I tend to run my best annual distro roundups, choosing the finest among five operating systems or flavors thereof that showed the greatest promise in terms of stability, usability, elegance, support, and other curious items in the outgoing twelve-month period. But I have never dedicated much thought to selecting the best implementation of any one particular desktop environment, regardless of the system underneath. But when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Oftentimes, distributions rise and fall based on their desktop session, because that is what users see and interact… 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

Let’s say you want to use an office suite on your favorite Linux distribution. All right, which one? This is an interesting question really, and often left without a good answer. Unlike most other categories, where friendly wars are most welcome, the office suite competition takes a back bench in the digital combat. So you know your way around browsers, media players or chat programs. What about office programs? Today, we will evaluate several worthy and less worthy candidates. The only criterion is that they run on Linux. We will not focus too much on cross-platform compatibility or Windows functionality…. Continue Reading