Bruce Byfield

LibreOffice only forked from OpenOffice.org six weeks ago. Already, however, news about its future directions is starting to trickle out. The details are sometimes sketchy, but they suggest that LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org could diverge more quickly than most observers imagined. Initially, The Document Foundation (TDF), which oversees LibreOffice development, announced a general set of principles […]

As regular as a scheduled crontab job, the articles keep appearing: Armed only with common sense, the writer is going to set the free software community straight on how it needs to improve. Typically, the articles are a mixture of demands for hardware support or new software and rejections of the way that the Linux […]

For several years, users’ experience in Linux has depended more on the desktop than the distribution. Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick), conveniently released within a few weeks of each other, do little to challenge that assertion. Changes are occurring in the back ends, but, from a users’ perspective, both these recent releases are hard […]

Last week, the OpenOffice.org Community Council requested the resignation of members who supported The Document Foundation, the recent fork of the OpenOffice.org project. This week, the results are revealed: resignations of key people, and a growing tendency to choose sides in the community. And the tragedy is that none of this angst seems necessary. The […]

From KDE’s Plasma Netbook to EasyPeasy, every Linux desktop for netbooks that I’ve seen are designed with the same assumptions. Each assumes that, because of the smaller screen, the desktop must be simpler than a workstation’s, and will be used mainly for light computing in general and social networking in particular. Released at the same […]

Reactions to Ubuntu are rarely balanced. Too often, people love or hate it so extravagantly that the opinions negate themselves. Often, the reactions are so extreme that a fair assessment of the popular distribution is difficult. Add some genuine mis-steps, and the assessment seems almost impossible. So exactly what does Ubuntu contribute to free software? […]

It could go either way. After a week of using GNOME Shell, the preview of GNOME 3.0, on Fedora 13, that is the closest I can come to a prediction about how GNOME’s new desktop will be received when it is officially released in the spring of 2011. On the one hand, GNOME Shell is […]

If you believe everything you read on the Internet, then Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu distribution, can’t do anything right. Part of the reason for this attitude is that, because of Ubuntu’s popularity, Canonical is under a scrutiny so intense that every fault is magnified. Another part of the reason is that Canonical is […]

Does free software offer too many choices? In the last dozen years, the question has been revived more often than the Daleks on Doctor Who. If the community could only agree to standardize on applications, deadlines, and options, the argument goes, then world domination would be within reach. The latest version of this argument is […]

Last week, when I wrote “7 Things You Can Do in KDE, But Not in Windows,” I assumed that anyone who was interested in the KDE 4 series had already explored it. However, the email I received and a few web searches soon convinced me that I was wrong. Apparently, many people do not use […]