KDE is my favourite desktop environment but as everything in this life it’s far from perfect. In this series we will simply check what KDE can learn from other desktop environments, starting by KDE’s longstanding “competitor” GNOME. Similarly there’s stuff GNOME and everybody else could learn from KDE. By the very nature of the topic…
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Small companies or individuals often have problems raising capital or getting loans and crowdfunding has emerged as the new way for them to get funded. All kind of projects and products from music to smartwatches have gotten the funds they need to make their ideas a reality. Other have failed and yet still managed to…
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Epic games is a company known to the public because of its award-winning and popular video games, the most famous of all belong to the Gears of War series for the Xbox 360. PC and old school gamers, however, probably identify them for their iconic series of first person shooters. The last iteration of Unreal…
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I’ve been using Linux for over 10 years now and I’ve managed to make more than a few user switch. My strategy is rather simple. I don’t rely on a checklist, because I don’t propose to them to switch to Linux entirely, I don’t even tell they switch to Linux. Here’s what I believe are…
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Many projects and software developers want their applications to be aesthetically pleasing and simple to use. Both imply uncluttered interfaces. Others want their application to be as useful as possible. These two are good goals that most software developers should include in their check-lists. The problem starts when developers and designers confront with the how…
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For a brief period of time GNOME was the princess of desktop environments. The most popular distribution out there, Ubuntu, used it. Distributions perceived as being very professional such as those from Novell or Red Hat, used it. Even the “alternative” distributions like Linux Mint used it. Later with KDE making the transition from 3…
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A year ago I wrote an article about the different directions taken by Unity and KDE respectively. Beyond describing them, I took a very firm stand: Canonical made changes for the sake of change and it was an inferior experience (KDE got its fair share of criticism too). A year later with a shiny new…
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Is proprietary software ethical? This is a hard question to tackle, one that I may attempt to answer in the future, for the time being I will content myself with trying to answer the much weaker question of what kind of software the government should use, i.e. Is the use of proprietary software by the…
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Recently, a new team composed by extremely talented designers was formed. Their goal? Design the visual appearance of KDE 5. Known as The Visual Design Group (VGD), they will ultimately design what will become the default look. There’re relatively newcomers on the group as well as old faces, Nuno Pinheiro the lead designer behind KDE 4’s…
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Minimum and usable requirements are not synonyms. Recommended specifications should not be confused with usability requirements, recommended specs are are more demanding (they represent the ideal set of components). A usability requirement is the condition in which the system not only installs and more or less works, but can also be used reasonably by other…
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Thanks to the release of Steam for Linux and the announcement of Steam OS, the number of games available for Linux have been going up systematically. Valve is also preaching by example and porting many of their games to Linux, perhaps the most exciting of all is Portal 2. One of the best games ever…
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The most famous e-mail client for Linux is probably Thunderbird, a powerful customizable client with support for numerous extensions. Geary is the new kid on the block, written entirely using Vala, instead of a power user heaven it attempts to be as simple as possible. Following GNOME’s philosophy. Why would anyone choose Geary over Thunderbird?…
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