A few days ago I overviewed Calligra, the KDE office suite, which also includes Krita, the powerful image editing tool. Although I’ve mentioned it as being free, it looks like Krita Gemini, which is the name by which Krita goes on Steam, actually costs $22.99, covering the work needed to build, release and maintain it on Steam.
Krita 2.8.1 in KDE:
Medit is a somewhat simple text editor with all the usual features you would expect from it: it has support for tabs, syntax highlighting, indentation and more.
GNOME Takes Over KDE
KDE, the popular desktop environment known for its modern interface and powerful configuration options, was taken over by the GNOME Foundation.
“We will completely rewrite KDE to conform with GNOME User Interface Guidelines. We will strip all the unnecessary options, remove the plasmoids, the panel and the menu from KDE.”
And if WesGold forum accounts weren’t enough for April 1st, here’s a better one: the 0 A.D. developers announce a new direction for the game, in which history and realism are substituted by the almighty hordes of zombies and the walking dead.
System Shock 2 is a 3D sci-fi shooter with a horror theme, and recently it has been made available for Linux as well on the Steam platform for $9.99.
During March, a few noteworthy articles were published here at TuxArena. Let’s have a look at the most important ones.
GNOME 3.12 Released with New Features, Apps, IRC Client
GNOME 3.12 has been launched during March, bringing a lot of improvements and features. Three new applications were introduced in GNOME as well.
Battle for Wesnoth is a completely free, feature-complete, very popular turn-based strategy game available for Linux. With Wesnoth 1.12 on its way (the second beta was released just a few days ago), Wesnoth benefits of a large, dedicated community and an active development. This is definitely a game which I love and occasionally play for a long time now.
Currently in Beta, Wesnoth 1.12 will bring groundbreaking new features:
Update: As mentioned in the first comment, this was an April Fools prank. Read this for details on Plasma Experiences.
A new dialog for choosing the Plasma Next look and feel has been proposed in a blog post by Thomas Pfeiffer, member of the KDE community and creator of the KDE Human Interface Guidelines.
According to an announcement on Reddit, Subsoap, developer of FaeVerse Alchemy, is offering free steam keys for Linux testers. Although the game is not yet live on Steam, the developers need Linux testers for the updates to come throughout this month.
I think Linux users can basically be divided into average users and users who will put time into learning, who are passionate about Linux and eventually are amateur or professional programmers. The average users only want their software to work, and will use the system to accomplish various tasks and not bother with the way things work since they will not need this information. Over the years the ease of use of Linux has advanced considerably, to the point where everything works neatly out of the box, and for the users who only need to use it for basic stuff like web surfing, listening to movies or graphics, there are distributions like Ubuntu or Mint to satisfy their needs. Which is great, since a computer is first a tool, intended to help you do something with it, from a spreadsheet to an advanced graphics or CAD project, for example. The other category includes all the knowledge-hungry guys who usually want to learn more as they advance, who will dig into tutorials, read books, test and experiment.
Of course, most of the time, especially when you need to solve the task at hand in a timely fashion, you will usually just find the quickest way that works, and probably not bother on how exactly does it work. These tips are for beginners, but mostly for those who like Linux as a whole and like to sacrifice some of their own time to go on a path of constant learning how it works.
One of the new changes in the latest release of SMPlayer is the version system, which changed and now follows a two-digit year and month number, in a similar way to Ubuntu for example. Hence, the latest version is 14.3, and was put out a few hours ago, while the previous version was 0.8.6.
When it comes to file managers, there’s such a rich range to choose from on Linux, one could get confused and just go with the default one provided by their distribution or desktop environment (like most do, actually). However, Dolphin or Nautilus are not the only kids on the block here. After reviewing Sunflower, it’s time to have a look at yet another twin-panel file browser, namely, Double Commander, which is a powerful twin-panel file manager which provides interfaces for both GTK and Qt, so it blends well in both GNOME and KDE, depending on which version you install, and comes with a bunch of configuration options and usability features.
Although it describes itself as a minimalist file manager, I have only words of praise for Sunflower, since it rather gathers a lot of features in a compact interface, and I do believe it needs a bit more attention. Sunflower is a twin-panel file manager with a somewhat different approach compared to standard GNOME/KDE/Xfce file browsers, written in GTK with several notable features and support for plugins.
