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

Installing Linux on most Windows PCs is a fairly straightforward process, you just insert the disk or plug in the USB stick and you follow the on-screen instructions, on Macs things are a little bit more complicated. The reason is most PC models from most manufacturers use BIOS, machines using UEFI are more and more common everyday, but for the most part they don’t pose too much of a hassle, things are a little different with Apple and is very custom EFI that doesn’t comply with the official specification. Installing versions of any distribution prior to Linux 3.11 will result… Continue Reading

We all love Linux, right. Or at the very least, we like it a lot. Well, we’re using it. Seriously though, this operating system provides us with an intellectual challenge, efficiency and satisfaction that we do not encounter elsewhere. However, that does not mean our favorite toy is perfect. When blinded with science and love, it is quite easy to forgive mistakes and problems, and that is exactly what we’re not going to do today. We will discuss a handful of big, glaring issues that plague Linux, and how their resolution would make it so much better and fun for… Continue Reading

Valve recently announced its own shiny Linux distribution, unlike most Linux distributions SteamOS will be targeted to gamers and designed to be used primarily on your television. Gaming has long been a sore spot for the open source community, big budgeted games had very few incentives to port their games into a relatively small platform and it caused the classical vicious circle: Gamers don’t use Linux because most games aren’t available, most games aren’t available because gamers don’t use Linux. The current situation also affects how committed hardware companies are into making good drivers. Valve added Linux support a few… Continue Reading

We have all been there. Our first attempt at Linux. And we have all forgotten it. The human mind does a wonderful trick of glossing over less glamorous details, forgetting boring ones, heightening trauma and success, making us believe that our journey to becoming special, i.e. Linux users, was a fairly trivial man-it-up ordeal. We have long lost the touch with reality, which is, most people have no darn clue about operating systems, especially not one named Linux. Today, I would like to try something rather impossible, or at the very least, in the words of Great Vizzini, inconceivable, sans… 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

Once upon a time Linux had what I think was the best music player/manager, its name was Amarok and people even brought it up as a way to try convince others to move to Linux, intelligent playlists, auto fetching of cover arts, lyrics, last.fm integration, etc, and it was great. Fast forward a few years (almost a decade to be fair) and now Amarok and all KDE music players seems to be lacking, with KDE 5.0 maybe this is the time to fix it. A cluttered mess. Look at the following picture. Is super cluttered, but what always catches my… 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