Some of you probably remember the big transition from KDE 3 to KDE 4, if you were not part of the community back then, put your seat belts on because the next version of KDE will be KDE 4’s last major release. Will try to keep you up to date about a new developments or plans (especially, when there’s something user facing we can show you), on this series though I will just complain about stuff I wish gets fixed by the time KDE 5 arrives. Wish 1. Fix System Settings I will beginning by noting that things have improved,… Continue Reading

Let’s say you want to use an office suite on your favorite Linux distribution. All right, which one? This is an interesting question really, and often left without a good answer. Unlike most other categories, where friendly wars are most welcome, the office suite competition takes a back bench in the digital combat. So you know your way around browsers, media players or chat programs. What about office programs? Today, we will evaluate several worthy and less worthy candidates. The only criterion is that they run on Linux. We will not focus too much on cross-platform compatibility or Windows functionality…. Continue Reading

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

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 Starting from 13.06 onward Amarok will cease to be Netrunner’s default music player and will superseded by Tomahawk, a relatively new comer to the scene of open source applications developed using the marvelous “Cute” toolkit.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

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

In a galaxy far far away, long before there was Android en masse, long before touch was popular, I mean retro-popular, because we have been using the touch technology for at least two million years, long before there was any modern, simplistic interface for smartphones and tablets, there was KDE. It’s all in the name. KDE is one of the few remaining staple desktop environments of the Linux world. It’s been around forever, and it does not seem to be slowing down. In fact, it’s evolving and growing. So far so good. One big thing that sticks to KDE is… Continue Reading