Bruce Byfield

KDE 4 is a radical overhaul of the popular desktop. It offers broad improvements like the Oxygen desktop theme, SVG graphics, and enhanced speeds thanks to the latest version of the Qt 4 toolkit. It also offers specific improvements such as the font manager and the Dolphin file manager. In short, there’s a lot to […]

[Correction appended to end of article.] Ever since I wrote “It’s Time to Get Over Microsoft,” people have demanded in blogs and emails how I could ignore the obvious threat that Microsoft represents to free software. Usually, I ask them to read the article more carefully, and note that it suggests that free software has […]

Although I regularly use KDE, Xfce, and other desktops for GNU/Linux, I keep returning to GNOME. Sometimes I use the default Metacity window manager, and other times the quicker Sawfish, but, with either choice, GNOME has an uncluttered look that allows me to focus on my work rather than my software. It also contains enough […]

Increasingly, reading what is actually said is a dying art. This impression had a boost last week from the reactions to comments made by Jim Zemlin, the executive director of The Linux Foundation in an interview with InfoWorld entitled “Linux Foundation: “We’d love to work with Microsoft.” From some of the reactions, you might have […]

Whenever I hear people discussing GNU/Linux’s prospects for becoming more popular, I’m reminded of a comment by Tommy Douglas, the social democrat who became a hero for introducing universal health care into Canada. If he could press a button and gain a million voters who did not understand his policies, he said, then he would […]

To outsiders, software whose source code is freely distributable is open source software. However, as soon as you become involved with the community that centers around such code, you quickly find that it is also called free software — and that the two terms are far from synonymous. Which term you choose to use can […]

Does GNU/Linux need to run Windows apps? This question resurfaced last week, when the media noticed that Google has been contributing heavily to the Wine project, which develops a compatibility layer on GNU/Linux for running Windows applications. Google seems to think so. Not only did Google employees and interns contribute over 1900 patches to WINE […]

At first, ranking GNU/Linux distributions seems alien to the spirit of free software. After all, free software is all about choice. What should matter is that your distro suits you, not how others judge it. Yet, in practice, community members judge distributions all the time. They don’t use a single metric, and at times a […]

Right now, my candidate for the worst job isn’t a nanny on a visa or a roofer on a hot summer day. It’s being a publicist for Trend Micro. By launching a patent violation suit against Barracuda Networks for distributing a piece of free software called ClamAV, Trend Micro has created a public relations disaster […]

Last week, Canonical, the commercial face of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, announced that it would be using its Partners repository to sell proprietary applications like Parallels Workstation. You can see the reasoning: Ubuntu’s Debian technology already has the infrastructure for on-demand downloads and software installation, so why not monetize it? But, if past incarnations of […]