Several weeks ago, my colleague Bruce posted an article on KDE/Plasma Activities, and this got me thinking again about this rather interesting and often overlooked functionality. On paper, it is supposed to be a killer feature; make your desktop fully customized to your specific needs. In reality, most people have no idea it exists, and…
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Documents, documents, documents. Didn’t Steve Ballmer shout that at some expo some time ago? No? Never mind. Let’s talk about Okular instead, then. This is a document viewer for Linux and THE document viewer available in the KDE/Plasma desktop environment. It’s been around for a long time, it’s survived quite a few seasons of ever-changing…
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The days are gone when the Linux desktop was dominated almost entirely by KDE and GNOME. However, the influence of their design philosophy remains, with KDE favored by a third of users, and many modern desktop alternatives, from GNOME itself to Linux Mint’s Cinnamon and MATE using applications originally designed for GNOME. Broadly speaking, KDE’s…
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One of the great disadvantages of the Linux desktop is its software distribution mechanism. While the overall concept of central software repos works great and has been adapted into powerful Stores in commercial products, deploying and using programs, delivered as packages, is a tricky business. It stems from the wider fragmentation of the distro ecospace,…
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You must test this new dock for KDE/Plasma, my friends told me the other day. I’m kidding. I do not have any friends. But I did get to see more and more references to Latte Dock recently, and not just beverage at the local coffee shop, so it got me thinking. Is this program as good…
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The classical desktop, consisting of a menu, panel, and a workspace, has been obsolete for years. What was adequate in the days of twenty megabyte hard drives now leaves users with the choice of either having a workspace inconveniently crowded with launchers, or starting applications entirely from the menu. In answer to this awkward set…
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Nailing the perfect software design is tricky. It is all too easy to confuse simplicity of aesthetics with simplicity of functionality. A piece of software can be deceptively plain looking – Google search for instance, but it can do a hell of a lot. On the other hand, you may have something with a huge…
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Ask not what you can do for Amarok. Ask what Amarok can do for you! Many years ago, just the mention of this music player would invoke shivers down my spine. It was stylish, exotic, modern, elegant, powerful. It did everything superbly, and there was always a hidden Joker up its sleeve. The plethora of…
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Plasma Activities — virtual desktops — remind me of word processor styles. Both improve work-flow, yet few ever use them. In fact, often they are scornfully dismissed by people who have no understanding of them whatsoever. This perversity only makes acceptance of these features more difficult, especially in the case of Activities, which can be…
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And a short time to get there, I’m east bound, just watch LXQt run. Yes. In a fashion similar to my rather exhaustive review of Plasma a bunch of weeks back, I am now going to give LXQt its due spin, rinse and ironing. Brace yourselves, or rather, grab some food and drink, for it…
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Over the years, my experience with KDE can best be described as a rollercoaster – on ice, with rocket thrusters. KDE3.5 was a great release, followed by a somewhat mellow, emotionally curbed KDE4, which took years blossoming, and then when it finally gained solid form, it was replaced with KDE5, or rather, Plasma 5. Since 2014,…
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Citizens of the Internet, welcome. Fonts in Linux are a rather neglected topic; there are things with a higher delight factor we could talk about, discuss, test, and indeed, write. But fonts be probably one of the most important elements of modern computing. Because we spend countless hours staring at monitors, and the precision of displayed…
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