Linux is much like the stock market. Moments of happiness broken by crises. Or is the other way around? Never mind. Today shall hopefully be a day of joy, for I am about to test Plasma 5.14, the latest version of this neat desktop environment. Recently, I’ve had a nice streak of good energy with…
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You like fonts, don’t you? Well, we all do. So what happens if you want to install a fresh new font in your Linux distribution, and that distribution happens to be running, say, a Gnome desktop environment? You will have probably noticed that the font management facility available in the system settings tool is rather…
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File system conversion is not an everyday thing. For that matter, it’s not even an every year thing. But when you do need to convert from one format to another, the operation is usually long, tedious and sometimes destructive. Most often, you would copy files to a backup location, re-format the partition, then copy the…
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One trouble with software and hardware reviews is that they are usually based on a few days of testing. If any long term problems exist, reviewers are unlikely to detect them. So, after six months of using my Keyboardio01 Model daily, I think it is time for an update, especially since a few issues have…
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Kdenlive is my video editor de jour since the dawn of civilization, or rather, as far back as my video editing attempts go. Pretty much all of the clips I uploaded to my Youtube channel were made using Kdenlive, with only some extra work in other programs. Kdenlive is powerful, flexible, useful, and now there’s…
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The concept of running Windows software on top of Linux is a tricky one. First, it defies the intended usage. Second, it requires some significant digital acrobatics in order to marry two incompatible layers, the Linux system and Windows applications. Over the years, the primary effort trying to reconcile the almost impossible yet tantalizing wedlock has…
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Tonight, on PIMP My GIMP: Tuxy McGnu, the infamous explorer of all things free and open, goes about testing the latest edition of GIMP, the cross-platform raster graphics editor. Rather pleased with the available capabilities, options, filters, and plugins he’s discovered in earlier episodes, and the single-windows view mode in Episode 8, Tuxy is keen…
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I like being surprised. I like being impressed. I like seeing quality, forethought, vision, and innovation embedded in software products. I like seeing pride and passion woven into the fabric of digital code. And when a nice piece of code walks in, I get sprung. A few days ago, I reviewed Plasma 5.13 and liked…
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Two years ago, the Plasma desktop was just another offering in the Linux pool, with a modern but overly complicated interface, bereft of enthusiasm and brimming with problems. Then, suddenly, it changed. Like a primordial being crawling out of a mineral soup, it started morphing into a slick, fast, elegant desktop. And now, it’s become…
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A bunch of days ago, the first stable version of Elisa, a new KDE-oriented music player, was released unto the wild. The program aims to be a simple, nice and flexible player, with good integration as well as cross-platform support. Sub-1.x releases of any which application are always tricky, but I still decided to give…
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The concept of addons is an interesting one. At some point over the past decade or two, companies developing (successful) software realized that bundling an ever-growing code base into their products in order to meet the spiraling tower of requests from their users would result in unsustainable bloat and complexity that would not warrant the…
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Once I reposition a few keys, what else could I want from a re-programmable keyboard? Not much, I used to think. Then I received my long-awaited Keyboardio Model 01, and my perspective quickly reversed. Once I started thinking of a keyboard as programmable, my perspective of a keyboard as a static piece of hardware was…
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