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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One reason that I appreciate KDE is that I am always discovering new applications. In fact, I make a point of regularly searching for them. My most recent discovery is Kile, a graphic editor for LaTeX. Kile is not the first of its kind, but, unlike the better known LyX, whose interface resembles a word…
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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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I have to admit, I wasn’t too pleased with my experience with Ubuntu MATE 18.04 so far. I mean, it was all right and all that, but there were too many bugs, too many problems, and even a few application crashes, which are a big no-no for an LTS release. But at the same time, I…
Continue reading →KDE’s Plasma has been my chief desktop for over a decade. My work-flow depends on Activities, and I appreciate how much I can customize in Plasma and how Plasma 5 has improved former weaknesses in interface design. While I frequently use other desktop environments to keep in touch, every one of them feels feels clumsy…
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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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Krita? GIMP? Darmok and Jelad at Tanagra. So, if you are into any kind of image manipulation, you probably have heard of GIMP, a free would-be (!) alternative to Adobe Photoshop, and in its own right a very reasonable and powerful image manipulation and processing suite, hence its acronymy name. But there’s less of a…
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While the technology landscape feels big, complex and colorful, the actual variation in creativity and uniqueness isn’t that huge. Often, ideas build upon other ideas, with small changes and incremental improvements. This is also true of our favorite domain, Linux, with its towering pyramid of distros and forks and still more forks, a whole cutlery…
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My expectations for Keyboardio’s Model 01 were high. I pre-ordered the keyboard during its 2015 crowdfunding campaign, and waited for over two years with increasing frustration as one delay in manufacturing followed another. Then, in 2017, the first Model 01s shipped — but not mine. By the time mine arrived in February 2018, my expectations were…
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Our friend William Shakespeare once wrote: To be or not to be, we must rejoice, for our GUI is so well-designed, the user always has a choice. Not really, but if he lived in our modern era, he probably would gaze upon desktop environments with a combination of bemusement, scorn and confusion. Testing desktops over…
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