In the Linux desktop world, the graphical user interface is here to stay. Old Unix hands may grumble, but the fact remains that, without all the efforts poured into GNOME, KDE, Xfce and others, Linux would not be as successful as it is today.

Recently, I wrote a post about the KDE 4.5 SC release candidate. In that post, I was a little bit critical about the discoverability of desktop activities. I wasn’t too sure of what the purpose of these were, and there was nothing in the interface for creating these activities that gave the user any hint of what they were. This article provides an update on desktop activities.

It is the dream of untold OpenSource developers to have OpenSource and Linux dominate the home desktop market. To banish Microsoft Windows from the the 'adults' table over to the 'kids' table forever. What is it that Linux and OpenSource need to offer to accomplish even a portion of that dream?

I run across people that get confused as to what a GUI is. Of course a GUI stands for Graphical User Interface and can be applied several ways and methods, but I want to focus on 3 things for this post... The 3 I want to hit on are Xorg, Desktop Environment and Window Manager.

Compiz Fusion is the best thing that happened to Linux desktop user experience yet. In the world of Linux bashers who argue that Linux is not quite ready for home users; compiz is one of the few things that really set Linux apart from other OS with major market share.

Dream Linux, the dream of every new user, or at least the distro that's a dream to use has taken another jump forward and released a newer version. But as with every new version, questions remain as to how well the new version stacks up against the older ones. And how does this one do against it's predecessors? Let's find out.

The latest series of the K Desktop Environment now utilizes Plasma, a new desktop and panel user interface tool that aims for a more functional, user-friendly, and sleek KDE desktop. Plasma also supports Dashboard-like widgets called plasmoids.If you want to further enhance the look of your KDE 4 desktop, I have here a list of some of the most beautiful Plasma themes available:

The latest K Desktop Environment, KDE, features two modes of interacting with the desktop – the classic Desktop interface and the Netbook interface. On recent KDE-based distributions that I have reviewed for this website, the default is the classic Desktop, but switching to the Netbook interface is an easy, few seconds process.

KDE keeps the desktop relevant and powerful as it doesn’t force an interface designed for phones or tablets on desktop users. KDE offers different GUI environments for different form factores. There is Plasma Desktop for desktop computers,Plasma Netbook for netbooks, and "Plasma Active" for smartphones and tablets. So a desktop or tablet user doesn’t have to make any compromise.