After a very short delay the new version of Netrunner has arrived. All the new features and changes introduced on Kubuntu 13.10 are also part of Netrunner 13.12, so our review of the latest of version of Kubuntu is pertinent as well. But there’s much more than just Kubuntu in Netrunner. What’s new? The new Homerun Kicker (Main) Menu This is probably the first thing users coming from 13.06 will notice. Netrunner has abandoned the classical style kickoff menu for a new more modern one called Homerun Kicker. But fear not: Netrunner didn’t jump into the bandwagon of replacing self-explanatory… Continue Reading

As a kid, I loved Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies, especially the Trinity series. Still, even then, the speech always felt stilted and weird. It was only years later that I discovered that it was all in Italian and dubbed in English. Like learning Santa ain’t real. So what has this got to do with the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE)? Well, everything. The sense of disillusionment that happened when KDE 4.X came out, the attempt to revive a classic in an age that prefers a different kind of experience. Yup, it’s a remake of the old and trusted KDE… Continue Reading

You’re walking down a street, with one of your significant others at your side. You pass by a restaurant, and it looks like a nice place to continue pursuing your infidelity. Then, you glimpse at the menu, and you decide whether you want to stay or not. Just like restaurants and bistros, operating systems have their menus. For a lot of people, they are the gateway into the operating system. You use them to explore the options, to peruse the variety, to make the right choice of software and usability before you take a proverbial bite. Indeed, let us explore… Continue Reading

Apple’s ubiquitous Macbook Air line has become synonymous with lightweight, portable and yet relatively powerful computer, the latest version is Apple’s attempt at making it a synonym of all day battery life. Thanks to Intel’s amazing new Haswell architecture achieving over 9 hours of battery life is feasible on laptops. The 11.6″ Macbook Air is in my opinion a very interesting proposition: Is not a lot bigger than an iPad, but is way more functional, has a proper keyboard, and the battery life is actually better than it is on the tablets if you limit yourself to iPad-like tasks. The… Continue Reading

The new version of Kubuntu has arrived right on time. Since is probably the most popular distribution out there after Ubuntu, it’s the vehicle in which most newcomers get to experience KDE. Unlike some previous releases 13.10 doesn’t make many user facing changes, most of them are pretty small, yet is always wise to remember that tiny changes add up over time. Whats’ new? Revamped Network Manager This is perhaps the first thing users upgrading from Kubuntu 13.04 will notice. The old interface was a bit clunky, it showed information most users don’t care for and wasted quite a bit of… Continue Reading

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