Like the laws of physics tell us, for every article, there’s an equal counter-article. Indeed, it is time to complete the battle royale started last week. In the first piece, we compared KDE and Cinnamon, arguably the two leading desktop environments in the Linux world, from the perspective of the former, in terms of what it can learn from its younger rival. Previously on Star Trek … I mean Netrunner, we saw that Cinnamon benefits from a jolly nippy development speed, both because of its age and size as a project, a tightly knit sense of belonging with the user… Continue Reading

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 Starting from 13.06 onward Amarok will cease to be Netrunner’s default music player and will superseded by Tomahawk, a relatively new comer to the scene of open source applications developed using the marvelous “Cute” toolkit.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

Well, this ought to be interesting. Battle royale, except we have no gentry, just the two seemingly and arguably dominant desktop environments for Linux. In my humble and narrow perception, there has been a dramatic shift in the Linux desktop usage in the past several years. Come the season of Gnome 3, a split happened in the community, breaking the decade old Gnome-KDE dominance. A whole generation of desktop environments was born, forked and knifed. Unity took its own path, Gnome 2 returned as MATE, and Gnome 3 was eclipsed by Cinnamon. Only KDE remained as it was, and now… 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

Let’s commence with a joke. If the British automotive industry of the 70s had been the one to invent the display server protocol, they would have called it British Wayland. Get it? It’s subtle. Very subtle. Anyhow, without focusing too much on the technical lingo, Wayland is a new protocol, designed to replace the sturdy and reliable X Windows System. The idea is to create a more modern, more relevant method of transferring video frames from applications to the on-screen display, in a manner that is fast, efficient and extensible. On paper, it’s an interesting approach to an old problem,… Continue Reading

After testing the KDE Plasma Netbook workspace quite thoroughly over the last few weeks, I got myself thinking. Is there something inherently successful about KDE, or the enabling framework underneath the hood, called Qt? Not that I’m any big fan of mobile technologies, still, I can appreciate good, thorough design when it happens. So I decided to explore this venue, from the purely user space perspective. Examples, examples, examples This is much like Steve Ballmer’s Developers Developers Developers slogan, only different. Anyhow, without boring you with history lessons on how Qt came to be, purchased, sold and acquired by different… 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