Bruce Byfield

For years, Linux and free software were perceived as threatened by cloud computing, the online storage of data. However, over the last few years, something ironic happened — free software became a major player in cloud computing. That wasn’t always the case. In 2008, Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, condemned cloud […]

Fifteen years after Sun Microsystems released the code for OpenOffice.org, most users still don’t know what they have, especially in the text processor Writer. Far from being an inadequate substitute for Microsoft Word, in LibreOffice, the code’s latest incarnation, Writer is so far ahead of its rival that there’s no competition. You would have to […]

At the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was debating an initial public offering for Canonical Software, Ubuntu’s commercial division. The news was interpreted as a sign of success in many circles, but whether making Canonical a public company would be a wise move seems doubtful at best. As reported by […]

Last week, founder Mark Shuttleworth opened the Ubuntu Online Summit with a challenge to Linux desktop developers. “I’m issuing a call to people who participate in every desktop environment,” he said, “to set aside our differences, to recognize that the opportunity now is bigger than those differences, to create experiences that spans phones and tablets, […]

Every since Linux first became popular, articles have been condemning its shortcomings. Hardly a month goes by without someone explaining what Linux lacks, or how it needs a particular feature, application, or service to be usable– and, as often as not, the complaints are misguided. Admittedly, the free software that runs on Linux has some […]

In February 2015, Xfce 4.12 was released. The first Xfce release in nearly three years, it was greeted with enthusiasm. Yet at the same time, a few users questioned whether the new version was as light on memory as earlier releases. It’s a good question — and by that comment, I mean, as people usually […]

In September 2014, rumors were flying that Apache OpenOffice was floundering and might soon merge with LibreOffice. The rumors were denied, but revived in March 2015 when Jonathan Corbett used development activity statistics to show that OpenOffice was seriously short of developers, and had corporate support only from IBM. Now, OpenOffice’s most recent report to […]

For years, the classical desktop has been the main interface for interacting with computers. Consisting of a menu, a panel, and an area to display widgets and open windows, its main virtue was originally its easy access to applications and files. It remains popular today, featured in at least five of the seven major Linux […]

Anyone who has used a desktop environment can be up and running in KDE in a matter of minutes. However, KDE has a way of hiding more advanced features, and some of them can take months or even years to discover. For example, here are 9 features that aren’t immediately obvious, but can enhance your […]

Why should you use KDE Activities? The best way to answer that question is to give some concrete examples of what you can do with them. Activities are virtual desktops. They share a common panel and menu, but each has its own layout and selection of items on the desktop. In addition, each has its […]