Qt desktops are many and varied. So one may ask, all right, if you have to choose one, which one? Well, the answer is both complicated and philosophical. First, because taste is subjective, and my immediate answer would be Plasma, hands down. The way it is realized in Kubuntu 17.04 is just awesome. The best…
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Purism, the company that has delivered free laptops, is now hoping to do the same for phones. As I write, the fundraising campaign is just over halfway to its goal, with 27 days to go. You might imagine that, with Purism’s past record, its efforts would be applauded, but instead, dozens of self-appointed pundits are…
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As a whole, the Linux desktop isn’t the most polished family of products in the universe. Due to the chaotic nature of software products, there’s a nonlinear correlation between quality and the amount of effort required to achieve it, and there just isn’t enough human power to fix it all. It’s easy to get to…
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The quest for the ultimate desktop environment continues. In the last few months, we have looked at a range of Qt-based desktops, starting with Ze Papa, Plasma, and then looked at several other new and not so new players, the bold and the beautiful, the less successful and the more rad. The list covers the…
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The menu crisis has been slow in coming — so slowly that few people are aware of it. Bit by bit, they have become accustomed to the inconvenience and distraction of the menu on the computer desktop, and learned to endure it. Yet the fact that KDE’s Plasma 5 desktop offers three choices of menu…
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The good thing about Qt (as a framework and technology) is that it powers so many interesting products seamlessly, quietly, unassumingly. The bad thing is, sometimes you may use something that has Qt DNA, and yet, you wouldn’t know it unless explicitly told. Such is the case with the Lumina desktop. This less-known desktop environment…
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In most ways, KDE’s Plasma 5 is an improvement over earlier releases. It is more minimal, and many functions are easier to use than in Plasma 4. Certainly, it is more stylish and often better designed for the current generations of computer users. However, in at least one case, Plasma 5 has left a mess.…
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If you’ve been using Linux for a while, you have probably heard or even played with various desktop environments; Unity, Gnome, Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon, and others. A personal quest of finding the most suitable interface between YOU and the system. But I bet you half a shilling you have not yet had a chance to…
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What does the world of Linux need more? Desktop environments? Nope. Ah, well, you’d be surprised, because a fresh new challenger appears! Its name is Liri, and it is the presentation layer for the namesake operating system being baked in the forges of community creativity as we speak. Sounds potentially interesting, but then we must…
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Three decades ago, StarDivision, the ancestor of LibreOffice and OpenOffice, was designed as an intermediate desktop publisher. However, many LibreOffice improvements are designed for users who insist on using it like a typewriter and entering manual formatting. Unofficially, I have been told that LibreOffice developers feel that, since manual formatting is the way most people…
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I used the word secret. Well, it’s a bit misplaced. It’s not like Plasma really hides its options from the users so that only a select elite can enjoy its full range of capabilities. But then, some of its many virtues are a little obscured from the common user by the proxy of subtle failings…
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KDE repeatedly polls as the most popular Linux desktop environment. However, since its numbers are 30-35%, that still means that over two-thirds use another interface. Many, too, rely on GNOME applications, that have an entirely different design philosophy. As a result, for many, KDE might as well be an entirely different operating system. Without some…
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