KDE

As somebody who’s always had Ubuntu in his daily life for the past 13 years, I sometimes find it hard to differentiate between all the versions. I do appreciate the progress though, albeit I’ve felt like the direction Ubuntu was taking was going to force me to abandon it eventually. Lately, though, I’ve enjoyed the increased polish and speed improvements of Gnome 3.36 dabbled with snap packaging, understood its “raison d’etre” and had the opportunity of participating in an Canonical hosted webinar for press to pose some questions. ...

Manjaro is a strange beast. It’s a distribution based upon the memetic Arch Linux. That doesn’t mean it’s BFU-hostile, though, or that you have to set it all up from scratch. In fact, Manjaro is an easy to setup distro you could install for your grandparents and sleep soundly knowing they will always have the (almost) bleeding edge software, with a eye-catching minty theme on top. Of course, you’d have to first instruct them to install the upgrades whenever the Octopi Pamac software manager pops up with a notification, otherwise it could fall victim to the classic rolling-release death trap of updating after too much time has passed. So what’s the difference between Manjaro and other user-friendly distros? ...

My very first experience with KDE was back in the day of Ubuntu 7.10, with KDE 3. I quickly got overwhelmed by the breadth of settings, it’s modularity and default look similar to Windows platform, from which I had just escaped. Source: By Rbuj – Own work, GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7014393 It only took me a few days, before I switched back to Gnome 2 and haven’t looked back until a couple years ago, when Canonical, much to my dismay, announced they were dropping Unity for Gnome 3. That was when I first installed KDE Neon based upon Ubuntu 16.04 and used it for several months. A few months ago, I have decided to give KDE another go and I kept using it to this day on my main laptop computer. What is KDE anyways? It is a Linux desktop environment, based on Qt Framework, as opposed to GTK Framework, used in most other DEs – Gnome, Pantheon, Cinnamon, Mate, etc. In it’s current incarnation, the KDE Plasma 5, it is very lightweight, snappy and clean-looking. It is inherently very modular and can be reshaped to pretty much any look and feel you’d like. However, because of this customizability, it is often looked at as hard to set up and is less widespread than it’s younger cousin. ...