Gold rush, in the digital form. That is, ladies and gents, what we call the mobile market. A success of one is an indicator of potential success for many. Hence, you get the proliferation of mobile operating systems for mobile devices. You have iOS, you have Android, some others, and soon, you might have FirefoxOS. At this point in time, you might be asking yourselves how the title might be relevant to the story. Worry not, it shall all be revealed soon. To boldly go where many have gone before All right, so Mozilla wants a piece of the action,… Continue Reading

My experience with the Enlightenment desktop slash window manager hails back to 2007, when I started exploring distributions like openGEU and friends. Then, fast forward two years, I’ve had my first encounter with Bodhi Linux, which comes with E17 as its default desktop. Fast forward some more, and we enter the year 2013, with yet another review of Bodhi. Half a decade ago, I was rather impressed with what the desktop could do. It managed a fair share of bling-bling, smooth transitions, shadows, transparency, and other cool effects, without having to rely on an expensive graphics card. It was all… Continue Reading

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

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

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

This is not a competition. The thing is, you can install any which program on any which distribution, pretty much, regardless of what desktop environment you choose to choose. Instead, this is a friendly reality check for people who prefer this or that operating system. Let’s say you wish to use only the native applications developed for your particular flavor of the desktop. How would your productivity or efficiency or peace of mind change then? We will pit Gnome programs vs. KDE software, across a range of categories. No browsers this time, since we did them only a few weeks ago,… Continue Reading

For most people, the choice of the Web browser is a funny formula of I-used-it-first, whatever is installed by default, followed by look and feel, speed, perceived security, and finally, last but not the least, actual functionality. On top of that, users tend to be quite loyal, or rather quite habitual, to their browsers, and they rarely venture about exploring new options and possibilities, even if they might be technologically superior. I’d like to give you an overview of several top browsers in the Linux world and how they stack against one another across the spectrum of basic requirements that… Continue Reading