Please support the Right to Repair bill!

In New York this month, a new bill has been opened up for debate in the legislature. It’s called the Right to Repair bill, and it concerns one’s right to experiment, tinker, and repair their own device without having to go through an authorized service center.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership: What it means for Free Software

Today, I’ll be writing something different from my usual distribution reviews. In this article, I’ll give a brief overview of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and discuss what it means for digital freedom, both in the case of free software and digital freedom of expression. Although the media isn’t reporting on this topic very much, I think this bill will affect our lives in significant ways, particularly for those involved in the Free Software community.

Korora 23 Beta MATE: Pretty much an average system, but generally well thought out

After a one-week or so delay, Fedora 23 was released on November 3, 2015. Somewhat uncharacteristically, the Korora variant, on which I’ve already written about before, was released only five days later. I gave Korora high marks in the past, proclaiming it as almost the Mint of the RPM world. So today, I’ll review the MATE edition and see how that stacks up against some other competitors, such as Linux Mint 17.2 and Ubuntu MATE. But first, a couple of notes.

Manjaro 15.09-rc2 KDE: Elegance and simplicity combine beautifully, with a couple of quirks

I’d already reviewed the Xfce version of Manjaro six months ago or so and was very impressed by it - so much that it still reigns as the best distro I’ve reviewed. Now, I’m going to take a look at the KDE edition - the other official version - and draw some comparisons.

LXLE 14.04.3: Lightweight and powerful, but also very well thought out

LXLE is a distribution that has been around for around three years. It used to be an LTS version of Lubuntu, but now it caters to those who want a lightweight and flexible desktop with lots of software, since Lubuntu has an official LTS version since 14.04. This review comes from the fact that after reviewing Bodhi, Lubuntu, and Crunchbang++, I still haven’t found a perfect, polished distribution yet. Will LXLE finally be it? Read on!

Editor’s note: Sorry about the unexplained 1.5 month hiatus as I was busy with schoolwork. I was also in India with bad connection speeds so I wasn’t able to download anything for review.

Solus 0.201529.4.0: Hold on, this is more beautiful than Elementary!

Solus, formerly Evolve OS, has started to make some splashes in the Linux pool recently. It introduces the new Budgie desktop, a simple desktop similar to Chrome OS. The distribution aims for beauty and also features a new, innovative package manager called eopkg. This review focuses on the daily 0.201529.4.0 build, released on July 16, 2015, rather than the May 17, 2015 Beta 2.

Mageia 5 KDE: Terribly implemented distribution; stick to openSUSE or Mint if you want KDE4

Only a month after Mandriva, the company behind the commercial Mandriva Linux distribution, declared bankruptcy, Mageia, the community fork of that distribution, announced its fifth major release since its inception in 2011. The distribution has enjoyed some success since then, currently placing sixth on the Distrowatch popularity rankings. Since I haven’t done a review of a KDE4-based distribution for this blog, I thought it would be a good hole to fill with a review.