A couple of days ago Michael Meeks published a blog called 'LibreOffice is the future of Free Software Office suites'. Michael is one of the lead developers of LibreOffice and also one of the founders of the Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice.

Read the full thing at http://ingwa2.blogspot.com/2011/05/calligra-is-future-of-free-software.html

OpenDocument is a great format, but sure, it has its problems. One of these problems is the lack of specification for some features. For instance, which image format should be supported ? PNG, JPEG, GIF, these one are only logical. SVG too nowadays… But we could create the Calligra Picture Format if we wanted to, store it in the OpenDocument file… And every other office suite would be lost.

Read the full thing at http://blog.pinaraf.info/2011/04/reverse-engineering-libreoffice/

Helsinki, Finland 7.3.2011. Digia Plc. (DIG1V) has signed an agreement with Nokia to acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business. Through the proposed acquisition, around 3500 desktop and embedded customer companies from various industries are targeted to be transferred to Digia. The transaction is expected to be closed by the end of March 2011. Nokia will continue to invest in future development of Qt for the benefit of all users, both Commercial and LGPL.

Read the full thing at http://www.digia.com/C2256FEF0043E9C1/0/405002251

You probably already know that a tiling window manager is one of the alternatives often provided by distributions alongside the standard Gnome or KDE desktops.

Instead of floating windows, with their ability to move anywhere, and stacked applications that overlap one another, a tiling window manager locks applications to the display, splitting as necessary to run applications side by side. When you run enough applications together, your desktop can start to look like a tiled bathroom, which is presumably why they're called tiling window managers.

Read the full thing at http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/pc/how-to-save-your-linux-screen-space-923730

KDE is delighted to announce its latest set of releases, providing major updates to the KDE Plasma workspaces, KDE Applications and KDE Platform. These releases, versioned 4.6, provide many new features in each of KDE's three product lines.

Read the full thing at http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.6/

There are two kinds of Linux users in the world – those who use Gnome and those who dislike KDE.

You can't blame them – to call KDE releases so far a disaster would be something of an understatement – but the tide has now turned.

Over 16,000 bug fixes and 1,700 new features later, the KDE developer unveiled KDE 4.5. The release has started popping up in many Linux distros, and it looks and feels stunning.

Here are nine reasons why it's time to log off Gnome and switch to KDE.

Read the full thing at http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/9-reasons-why-you-should-switch-to-kde-4-5-919637

Created as part of the Google Code In program by Claudio Desideri with help from his project mentor, Jorge Salgueiro.

Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tw2JOuct7k

I’ve always loved to tinker with things. The Teddy Ruxpin doll I had when I was younger, the first home PC my parents bought for me and my brother, and eventually Linux (thanks to my awesome brother, Eric, who got my video drivers working back when I didn’t have a clue what was going on). Over the years in Linux Desktop land I’ve always seemed to gravitate towards the Gnome desktop environment. It was simple, functional, fast and well thought out. Over time, my lust for customizing every aspect of the desktop to fit my liking went into hibernation as I started to work on projects and divert my attention elsewhere.

Read the full thing at http://www.unixlads.com/?p=33

After a long year of changes in the kde-www land, ranging from looks to scm switches, a final last coup:

KDE is running its own pastebin service now!

Read the full thing at http://neverendingo.blogspot.com/2010/12/news-from-kde-www-pastebin.html

I don’t normally comment on other people’s software… but… a little while ago, opensuse was wondering whether KDE apps would work with these Gnome Shell requirements. Last time I checked, their “Activities” sounded like virtual desktops, but now they’ve returned to an application-based shell. This in sharp contrast to Plasma Desktop’s increasingly Activity-oriented workspace.

So what does that mean? Well, in gnome-shell, windows are organized by application – by the binary that spawns them. All your firefox windows are grouped together, all your okular windows grouped together, etc. You can still group windows on virtual desktops, but alt-tab is application-based, so as soon as you’ve got more windows than screen space you may as well have everything on one desktop.

Read the full thing at http://chani.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/activity-oriented-vs-application-oriented-workspaces/