You know the drill. ‘Tis a fun drill. We vote for the best distribution plus its associated desktop environment, of the year. Several days back, we discussed KDE, and today, we will talk about Xfce, the desktop that broke through the thick sheet of irrelevance like a nuclear submarine surfacing from underneath the arctic ice caps, and became one of the leading choices for Linux users out there. Sure, we cannot disregard Unity, or Cinnamon, but those are singular choices for particular distributions, whereas Xfce happily abides in many a developer house. What’s more, it’s grown and matured and become… Continue Reading

The end is nigh. The end is upon us. We are, of course, talking about the end of the calendar year, and this means voting for the best of the best. In a few days, we will have the grand Dedoimedo best distro contest, but before we do that, let’s do a more specific vote. Namely, let’s elect the finest KDE distro of the current year. We did this last year, and the winner was Kubuntu Ringtail. It proved out to be a very solid, polished distribution, with good stability and good looks. Now, why would you care? Well, because… Continue Reading

For many people, the release of Firefox 29 unto the market signified a symbolic death of Mozilla’s flagship product, the Firefox browser. The specific edition came out with looks barely indistinguishable from Chrome, and with a big drop in UI productivity. As a result, a large number of Firefox users started prowling the Web, searching for alternatives. In this article, I’ll try to provide some, without linking to my rather R-rated review of Firefox 29 and the tutorial on how to transform it into a usable application. You can search for those, if you like. We will be focusing entirely… Continue Reading

October 31 is supposedly supposed to be a frightening date, especially when it falls on Friday. Go figure. But no need for that. In fact, it’s a happy date, because we are going to continue our Windows to Linux migration saga with a brand new chapter, and this one discusses the delicate topic of mail clients. I have never given a proper overview of this subject before, like ever, so this is a fantastic debut. More specifically, we will discuss a handful of mail client software offerings available on a typical Linux distribution, talk briefly about how to set them… Continue Reading

Marble, the one we are referring to here, is a free, open-source world atlas and virtual globe software somewhat akin to Google Earth and friends. It is also a part of the KDE software suite, which makes it even more interesting. Now, it’s no stranger, either, and we have seen this little tool in action a few years back. I decided to re-explore [sic] Marble once again and see what it can offer, especially now that version 1.9 has been released. Sadly, the new build is only available for Windows at the moment. Ironic, is it not. The version present… Continue Reading

Several days back, when I saw an article covering Plasma 5, written by my colleague Luis, I immediately stopped reading. The reason was, I intended to write a piece of my own, and I did not want to taint my subjectivity with someone else’s. I promised myself I would read it, just a few moments before I conclude this review. Anyhow, I tested the new KDE release while still in an early stage several months back, and it showed great beauty and decent promise, despite being rather devoid of any real functionality. Since, dozens of releases have been baked, each one… Continue Reading

The first article I wrote on Netrunner-mag was about KRunner and now it has been entirely redesigned. Originally KRunner was just a “run command dialog”, with KDE 4 it grew to be far more. Many features were added, from the ability to read equations to translations to search. Yet its KDE 4 interface didn’t evolve to reflect this. With the latest version of KDE Frameworks, KRunner’s interface has been modified to match its functionality even better, even its branding has changed. Plasma Search Run dialogues are, for the most part, only used by relatively advanced users. For the majority running… Continue Reading

Since the advent of smartphones and tablets much has been said about the idea of convergence. The word is used to refer to different concepts that are related to some extent. I think at at the core of the discussion the word convergence is code for how you think the devices from the near future will be and how will they interact with each other. So why not take a peek at how different groups talk about convergence? It will give us a better understanding of what they think the future will or should be. Let’s start by the two… Continue Reading