A play on the Audi slogan: Vorsprung Durch Technik. Except we’re going to talk about something that is clearly not progress. Systemd. Roughly 6 years ago, Systemd came to life as the new, event-based init mechanism, designed to replicate the old serialized System V thingie. Today, it is the reality in most distributions, for better or…
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Music goes beyond the sum of all notes and lyrics. There’s also the presentation layer, and when you are working on a desktop, a Linux one in particular, the digital component of how the music is delivered unto you does count. You want to enjoy your songs with style. As simple as it sounds, nailing…
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Ladies, gentlemen, everyone else. Not that long ago, I reviewed Open365, a free, open-source, cloud-based productivity suite based on LibreOffice, with some nice spicy additions. I liked it. It’s a pretty decent product, with a lot of potential. But there’s still a lot more work to be done. The one aspect of the five-app combo…
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To modern newcomers, Linux means Linux Mint or Ubuntu — a polished desktop with a few advanced details to differentiate it from any other operating system and a standard set of applications. However, the schools of Linux can be different enough that one distribution can differ from another so much that they could almost be…
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Linux is highly portable. Fact. On the other hand, Linux software is the least portable technology in the world. Try running Firefox designed for Debian on Fedora. In fact, try running Firefox designed for one version of Fedora on another Fedora, perhaps a slightly older version. Godspeed, Captain Jack Sparrow. The fanatical rigor with which the…
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Office, suite, cloud. Sounds familiar. Google Docs. Yup. Microsoft Office 365. Yup. LibreOffice. No. Wait, what? Buzzwords around modern technology concepts are all too easy to ignore, but this one actually caught my attention beyond the almost-too-cliche dotIO domain, the blue design very reminiscent of Docker (hint), and optimistic text that promises wonders. Anyhow, Open365…
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Increased security often comes at a price in Linux distributions. Tails, for example, allows anonymous browsing at the cost of running from a flash drive. Similarly, Qubes OS provides comprehensive security but with an enormous increase in memory requirements. By contrast, Subgraph OS (SGOS) increase security by installing existing security features that other distributions leave…
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Following on from our prior article and one more step in my lifelong (?) quest to rectify all the sillines that goes into teaching computing to kids, comes BLOCK PROGRAMMING II – EVEN BLOCKIER. Or how Snap! is a must-use tool now Scratch isn’t.
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Also known as a really good song by Chris Rea. Also known as, ladies and gentlemen, I am terrified. What will become of Linux in 2017? Will it even boot? Now, now, please, relax. I am not trying to be an attention person of fiscally questionably nature. I am just trying to share my fears…
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The people who make Scratch have migrated it to Flash. This is the most bonkers, hare-brained, backward idea they could have had. Migrating to a proprietary, platform-dependent, insecure, soon-to-be-extinct framework dooms Scratch to oblivion. Not to worry: we know of several excellent alternatives.
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With Ubuntu releasing Snappy and Red Hat releasing Flatpak, suddenly universal package managers are in the news. Maybe we should talk about Guix too. Both Snappy and Flatpak have their points of interest, but exaggerated claims about both of them are all too common. In this situation, GNU Guix, which for two years has been…
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In the final installment of this series we shift our focus away from FLOSS applications for creating bitmap graphics (in Chapter 1 we talked about Krita and in Chapter 2 about GIMP) to Inkscape, a seriously cool application for creating vector graphics, and we do so by talking to Tom Carlos, an artist who uses…
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