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

Let us be non-mainstream. In the world of Linux desktop environments, Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) is not your typical first or second choice. Most people will mention Gnome, KDE, perhaps Unity. You may have heard of Cinnamon and MATE lately, and Xfce is also a solid, longtime niche player. LXDE keeps slipping under the radar. The thing is, without decent financial backing by the big names, it is very hard creating and maintaining a robust and bug-free desktop environment that can address the needs of the common user, if a Linux user can ever be classified as common in… 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

Normally, at the end of the year, I do my usual Linux distro showdown. But I have never really done a proper desktop environment comparison, regardless of which operating systems run them, even though in the Linux world, quite often, it is hard to separate the two. Well, it seems to me, this is a great opportunity to give you a comprehensive head-to-head clash between the leading desktop environments that bless our distros. Before we begin, it is important to make a humble statement. There’s desktop environment, there’s desktop manager, and there’s window manager. Sometimes, the definition and distinction of… Continue Reading

A few weeks back, we talked about KDE and Gnome in daily life, and how they fared from the applications perspective, when you pit programs developed for one environment against those created for the other. We learned a valuable lesson that technology and practicality do not necessarily go hand in hand, nor that you can easily draw a clear line between the two. Finally, we discovered the joy of freedom, in that you can mix software, regardless of whichever desktop you choose, and get the best of all worlds. Now, the big question is, does the same set of conclusions… 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

In other words, will you cry if you data ends up in some thunderstorm somewhere out there, aptly known as The Cloud. In this article, I want to show, present and debate the merits of using cloud-based technologies for enhancing your computer usage. And by enhancing, I mean, see whether this can really happen. We will discuss the e-cloud, what it means for the common user, how can one leverage their offline storage with online services, whether they are useful in practical daily scenarios, and what kind of precautions one might want to take to avoid deadlocking oneself by technology…. Continue Reading