The world of documents, spreadsheets and presentations is roughly divided into two. There’s Microsoft Office, and then, there’s everything else. In the second bunch, LibreOffice features prominently, often touted as a free alternative, with a wealth of tools, options and features. I am a mostly happy user myself, although I’ve never been able to fully commit…
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Last year, I decided to do a thorough analysis of the KDE and Gnome application stacks, separately, to figure out how complete these two desktop environments really are. I looked at the different application categories, weighed the major advantages and flaws in the popular software, examined some unique entries, and then also talked about what’s…
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What’s your unicorn, someone asked. The answer is, a really nice screenshot tool, so that I can do my software reviews with speed, elegance, delight, and, most of all, efficiency. With roughly 5,000 screenshots manually created every year, excluding the automated in-game stuff and whatnot, I am in a dire need of a program that…
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A name was mentioned. An application was tested. In my Gnome apps review from several weeks back, one of the comments pointed out Boxes, a virtualization product that is native to this desktop environment, and which I completely missed. Indeed, as far as software goes, there are no other desktop-specific virtualization products. To amend my…
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We talked about Xfce. We talked about Plasma. ‘Twas a turbulent year, and yet, it didn’t really have any defining Linux moments. More sort of steady state, stuck in the middle of a prolonged identity crisis where both the desktop and Linux are struggling to find innovation. Now we ought to talk about Gnome, the…
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Let us Plasma. A few days ago, we talked about the bestest Xfce distro of 2018. It was an interesting but also somewhat predictable experiment, as things haven’t changed that much on the Xfce scene, with most distros slowly moving along, well set in their grooves, some oiled, some rusty. Now, we need to examine…
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The current calendar year is slowly converging toward its end. That means one thing! Well, two things. Festivities and liver stress testing for most people (that’s one thing), and Linux distro evaluation. Indeed, the past almost-year has gone by with many an ISO etched and booted. Following the tradition from the previous few years, we…
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A couple of weeks ago, we talked about KDE apps. I went through the default stack of programs available in the desktop environment, and examined their suitability, maturity and fun for everyday use. The next logical step is to examine the Gnome desktop environment and its bundle from the same angle. If I think about…
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What is the one big advantage that Linux distributions have over Windows? If you ask me, that would be the fact that distributions come as complete bundles containing the kernel (i.e. operating system), the drivers, the desktop environment, and on top of that, a stack of applications that allow users to be productive from the…
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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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