Bruce Byfield

When I tell people that I use Linux, they look at me with pity. In their minds, I have just confessed to being a fanatic who is willing to undergo daily hardship and inconvenience in defense of my beliefs. When I go on to tell them that the KDE desktop is in many ways more […]

Ubuntu 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat, is still two months from its final release. However, if the first alpha and the forecasts about it are an accurate indication, the release is already taking on a character all its own. Specifically, Maverick may be the release in which the Ubuntu version of GNOME differs from generic GNOME […]

By the standards of previous releases in the KDE 4 series, KDE 4.5 is tame. It has few new applications, and introduces no new technologies. Yet with its combination of small innovations and interface improvements, KDE 4.5 still manages to be a release worth installing. Although it does not try to expand the concept of […]

OpenOffice.org 3.3 will be the third release since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in January 2010. The first two, releases 3.2 and 3.21 were both relatively minor, and, from the just-released beta, 3.3 looks like more of the same. The motto for the 3.3 release is “Fit and Trim.” The phrase is vague, but suggests a […]

Ubuntu is a distribution that people have strong feelings about, both pro and con. Last week, those feelings erupted again after former Red Hat employee and Fedora community architect Greg DeKoenigsberg ranted about Ubuntu’s contributions to the GNOME desktop in his blog. DeKoenigsberg has since apologized, but the issue is still worth a closer look, […]

The recent history of the Amarok music player is like a scaled-down version of KDE’s recent past. Like KDE 4, the Amarok 2 series was greeted with a user revolt that has only gradually quieted. And just like KDE 4 inspired Trinity KDE for those who preferred KDE 3, so Amarok 2 inspired Clementine, a […]

To most users, KDE 3 is obsolete, replaced two years ago by the KDE 4 series. Yet, many continue to lament the loss of KDE 3, and greeted enthusiastically the news earlier this year that a project called Trinity KDE had started in order “to keep the KDE 3.5 computing style alive, as well as […]

In the Linux desktop world, the graphical user interface is here to stay. Old Unix hands may grumble, but the fact remains that, without all the efforts poured into GNOME, KDE, Xfce and others, Linux would not be as successful as it is today. The reason for the desktop’s success is obvious. A desktop requires […]

Not long ago, the overwhelming issue on the Linux desktop was catching up with Windows and OS X. Partly, the concern was usability, but it also included the need for a rich ecosystem of utilities. But some time in the last few years, that goal was reached, so quietly that exactly when is impossible to […]

Several weeks ago, I ended a comparison of the KDE 4 and 3 desktops by saying “Unless a project takes over KDE 3 development, sooner or later it may become unusable with the latest generation of computers.” What I had missed — free software being a large place where events move at near-light speeds — […]