Bruce Byfield

While Ubuntu has always emphasized usability, Fedora’s focus has been innovation. Now in current beta, Fedora 13 (codenamed Goddard) is no exception. However, at first Fedora 13 may seem to lack many innovations unique to the distribution as opposed to its component applications. In fact, with many of the improvements and innovations either working behind […]

No one is better qualified to talk about the state of the KDE desktop than Aaron Seigo. A former member of the board of KDE e.V, the German non-profit that oversees the project, Seigo is a lead developer on the desktop. Last weekend, I interviewed him at the Calgary Open Source Systems Festival, COSSFest, in […]

GNOME 2.30 was originally intended to coincide with GNOME 3.0 — a massive cleanup and rethinking of the popular desktop. However, GNOME 3.0 is delayed for at least another release, which leaves GNOME 2.30 as most likely the last version in a series stretching back almost a decade. You will find signs of what is […]

At first, the rumors seemed irresistible. Miguel de Icaza, the creator of Mono, the GNU/Linux implementation of .NET, was saying what free software critics have been saying for years: the spread of .NET has been handicapped by Microsoft’s restrictive patent policies. Then, mysteriously, the SD Times story in which de Icaza is quoted disappeared from […]

When Ubuntu drinks, the free and open source software (FOSS) community gets a hangover. The distribution is so influential that its every development sends echoes rippling through the greater community. How else to explain how a simple change in desktop themes should spark not only debates about usability, but about how decisions are made in […]

Ubuntu’s Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04) is still six weeks away from release. However, on the eve of the first beta release, the daily builds and news releases suggest that Lucid will be one of the most innovative versions of Ubuntu for several years. Scheduled as a Long Term Support release that will be supported for […]

Three years ago, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) was a faltering project — so much so that, when I wrote about it, one commenter questioned whether the project was still alive. However, since then, accounts of LXDE’s death have proved greatly exaggerated, and the project is once again flourishing. Today, LXDE is available in […]

Between radical changes and limited functionality, the KDE 4 series got off to a rough start. However, with each release, KDE 4 has improved steadily and silenced more critics. Now, with the KDE 4.4 release, the series has reached first maturity. Those who expect everything to behave exactly as it did in the KDE 3 […]

One unforeseen benefit of the rise of netbooks is the rethinking of desktop interfaces. Compared to workstations, netbooks have smaller screens and less memory, and developers generally assume that users do less demanding tasks on them. As a result, developers are starting to redesign interfaces to function better within these constraints. These assumptions are questionable […]

ALSO SEE: Ubuntu vs. Fedora: The Latest Versions Square Off Fedora or Ubuntu? That is a question that Linux users are asking with increasing frequency. The question is not random — the two distributions have consistently topped the downloads on Distrowatch for the last two years. Read Fedora and Ubuntu mail forums, and users who […]