Be Wary Of “Fake” Open Source Software Open source software have become more important today than in the past. The benefits brought by using open source software for governments, organizations and commercial businesses can not be emphasized enough. This is why you’ll probably see an open source software running in every corner of the modern IT infrastructure. This, however, made the term […] July 4, 2022July 4, 2022
5 Years Later, Unity Desktop Is Forming an Accidental Renaissance It has been 4 and half years since Canonical announced their decisions to drop Unity desktop for GNOME, drop the convergence experience and shift focus towards the cloud and IoT devices. The Linux community reactions back then were mixed. Some people liked GNOME and some people didn’t. Those who didn’t switched to other desktops such […] November 20, 2021November 20, 2021
Snaps Are Quite Fantastic, For Some Use Cases 75% of users are still depending on traditional package mangers (APT, DNF… etc) instead of using Snaps or Flatpaks, but this is gradually starting to change, as larger organizations and development communities start to use the latter instead of the former. Some people like Snaps, some people hate them, which is fine, just like most […] January 31, 2021January 31, 2021
OpenOffice Still Gets +1.5 Million Downloads Per Month, Despite Being Discontinued OpenOffice started as the open source version of “StarOffice” by Sun Microsystems in 1999. It continued to be a the mainstream Microsoft Office alternative through the 2000s and kept improving over time, until a community fork happened in 2011 after Oracle acquired Sun. The community feared that Oracle would shut down the project due to […] November 29, 2020November 29, 2020
Fair Code vs Open Source, Which Wins The Future? Fair code is a new software development model which aims to replace the long-ruling open source model. Fair code authors argue that open source software lack a critical point in terms of commercial usage of the software, and hence, introduced their initiative to fix it. What is Fair Code? When developers release their software as […] September 20, 2020May 11, 2021
Despite Efforts, Traditional Package Managers Still Dominate Linux Desktop Many app packages were introduced in the last few years to the Linux desktop, such as Snap and Flatpak. These app packages aimed to solved different issues; From dependency hell and up to providing isolation and easy deployment, but to what level did Linux users like these new solutions? Not much, it seems. How Many […] August 22, 2020August 22, 2020
Distrowatch is NOT a Measure for Distributions Popularity Distrowatch is one of the most famous websites about Linux distributions (and other Unix-like operating systems) that has been in service since 2001. It covers the new releases of a huge number of Linux distributions in its database, and also has a special “ranking” algorithm for those distributions. What we unfortunately notice in a lot […] January 26, 2020January 26, 2020
The Status of Fractional Scaling (HiDPI) Between Windows & Linux There’s a special type of displays commonly called “HiDPI“, which means that the number of pixels in the screen is doubled (vertically and horizontally), making everything drawn on the screen look sharper and better. One of the most common examples of HiDPI are Apple’s Retina displays, which do come with their desktops and laptops. However, […] July 21, 2019July 21, 2019
Governments Are Spending Billions on Software They Can Get with Freedom How a Software is Owned In the proprietary software world, when software is released, and when users buy that software, they don’t usually buy the entire software, but instead, they buy what’s known as an end-user license agreement (EULA). This EULA gives them the right to do only some specific things with that software. Usually, […] February 14, 2019April 16, 2019
Dark Days are Waiting the Open Internet There’s no argument that the Internet is one of the backbones of the modern world today. Yet, it seems that we are heading toward the end of the open Internet on the long run; An Internet that respects the user privacy & security, and protects him both from censorship and tracking seems to be long […] December 10, 2018April 16, 2019
Understanding Microsoft’s Acquisition of GitHub and its effect on the FOSS Community Around one month ago, Microsoft was confirmed to be willing to buy the giant software development platform GitHub for $7.5 billion. News which made the open source community around the world afraid on the future of the platform and the projects hosted on it. It appears that many folks still do not trust Microsoft for […] July 8, 2018May 30, 2020
A Privacy & Security Concern Regarding GNOME Software GNOME Software is the default application in the GNOME desktop environment to manage software. It also allows you to receive firmware updates through an underlaying daemon called “fwupd“, which is based on an platform called “LVFS“. In order to understand the relationship in a clearer way, you can think of LVFS as the online platform […] April 13, 2018April 16, 2019
Where’s Xfce 4.14? Current Development, Roadmap & Future Xfce is one of the most common desktop environments on Linux and other Unix-like systems. it’s fast, lightweight and gets the job done. However, Xfce developers announced their roadmap to Xfce 4.14 around 3 years ago, but we are still not there yet. In this report, we post the ongoing development of Xfce, what’s missing […] February 26, 2018December 23, 2018
Why Linux Marketshare Stats Are Wrong Every few months, new statistics about Linux users on desktop platform come out. The methodologies used for each one varies according to its provider. However, they all share one thing: Being wrong. Measuring number of users who use a certain operating system on desktop is totally different thing from servers or other devices. E.g for […] July 4, 2017June 14, 2021
