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

Wish-fix-it is a series of things I would like to see improved in “KDE 5”. As I will point out in the future, many of my wishes will soon change their statuses to fixed, which excites me a lot. No matter how good a piece of software is, it can always be improved upon. After years of using KDE as my main desktop I came up with a few suggestions regarding Plasma’s user interface. My first idea is nothing new: To get rid of the cashew. This has been suggested ad nauseam, but ignored for the most part. Why does… Continue Reading

I love testing Linux distributions. And how much comfortable life is for today’s Linux testers! I vividly remember when downloading a flavor of Ubuntu, or OpenSUSE, or SLED, or Fedora, took a long time. I remember leaving my computer on all night to download them. I had a big pile of blank CDs, and later DVDs, to burn my ISO images. Many markers for my handwritten notes describing the distribution and the version in each disk. No matter how many times you had  done it, trying a new distribution was a time consuming task. You needed to download a distribution, get… Continue Reading