PCLinuxOS Magazine and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 03, 2025

• Applications

  • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Repo Review: OnlyOffice Desktop Editors

    I am a fan of LibreOffice and have relied on it at home since its initial release in 2011. However, we know that Microsoft Office predominates in most organizations and that office tasks are handled by the triumvirate of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

    LibreOffice’s compatibility with Office Open XML file format (informally known as OOXML) has greatly improved over the years, but sometimes I must deal with an MS Office file that stymies LibreOffice. The formatting might have gone awry — with paragraphs aligned incorrectly, page breaks in odd places, etc. When this happens, there is an open-source program that can help: OnlyOffice Desktop Editors. OnlyOffice is fully compatible with OOXML formats — .docx, .xlsx, .pptx — and can (usually) render these files “natively,” i.e., identically to Microsoft Office.

  • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Tip Top Tips: Is Your Handbrake Too Hot to Handle? Try cpulimit

    Let's start with a statement of the problem. I use the Handbrake media transcription program (okay… it's a disk ripper) more than anyone really should. I back up my DVDs to Matroska video files and store them on my Media Center, an old Dell Precision T3500 (haven't cracked the code for Blu-Ray yet, but I do have a USB 3.2 BD-R drive).

    Well, I tend to actually use Handbrake on my laptop, since it can rip a 90-minute movie in under 30 minutes (to a 720p .MKV with no restorative presets or filtering). The problem was that it would cause my CPU to approach/exceed 200 deg. F (just a fuzz over 93 deg. C).

• Instructionals/Technical

  • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ GIMP Tutorial: Create A Wave Effect

    I watched another video by Davies Media Design about making a neat wave effect in GIMP. It seems like a lot of steps, but it’s still pretty easy. I generally do these at least twice to make sure I understand them. It’s also pretty fun.

    After opening GIMP and creating a new file (File > New or just pressing <CTRL> + N), fill with whatever Background color you want. I used red the first time, but I’m using dark green now.

    To keep everything straight, add a vertical guide, using Image > Guides > New guide (by percent) and make the guide vertical and the percent 50%. He added a horizontal one too, but I didn’t the second time because I never used it the first time.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Could KDE & Gnome Have Their Own Distro?

    KDE and GNOME have decided that because they're not big and complicated enough already, they might work better if they have their own custom distributions underneath, according to an article from The Register. What's the worst that could happen? A talk from this year's KDE conference, Akademy 2024, looks like it's going to become real. The talk, by KDE developer Harald Sitter, was titled An Operating System of Our Own, and the idea sounds simple enough: Sitter proposed an official KDE Linux distribution. Now the proposal is gathering steam and a plan is coming together for an official KDE Linux – codenamed “Project Banana.”

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • PCLinuxOS

    • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ From The Chief Editor's Desk...

      Why, oh why, do these broadcasters think we want/need to watch the same holiday movies over and over and over and over and over and over again? One broadcaster so badly edits the original movie that we often opt to re-watch it from the HTPC, where the original movie exists without all of the unnecessary edits (and without the annoying commercials!). This same network has no problem airing unedited dialogue from other shows it airs, so it’s pretty unclear why they feel the need to edit the dialogue of this holiday classic.

    • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Screenshot Showcase

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • The Wall Street Journal ☛ IBM’s Planned $6.4 Billion HashiCorp Takeover Faces U.K. Antitrust Scrutiny

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Ready to remix? Favourite projects to tinker with

      From space-themed games to digital art, discover our hands-on activities that inspire young coders to learn and build essential skills.