Blog...

My thoughts among other things

• 23rd December 2009

• Well, looks like most things are finished!

Gentoo guide written... check! Hosting bought and paid for... check! Awesome, now I can let people flock to my website! One problem with that... CNAME was set wrong and you can only access it by menkeh's server's ip address... awesome! George 'tarded up again.

On the KDE4 side, I decided to ditch it. All in all I found it to be poor, very poor. Far less stable than KDE 3.5 and Gnome and just not worth putting up with all the quirks and inconsistencies. I still can't see the point of haveing 2 file managers. Konqueror is a good web browser but poor file manager so the "replaced" it with dolphin (which I like a lot) but didn't take out the file manager part of konqueror. That would be fine but there are some things that Konq will do that dolphin won't and vice-versa - very annoying.

• (Early hours of) 1st March 2009

• KDE4 again

After getting over the initial aesthetics of KDE 4.2 i'm currently having a bit of trouble working with it. the problems I have been having are as follows:

• Random crashes
• Inability to resize internal window in the new file manager "Dolphin"
• General ugliness and crapness of Dolphin
• Applets and menus freezing and crashing
• Menu not updating when programs are installed
• Menu still not updating after running the menu update tool
• Changing the theme is difficult and laboured compared to Gnome

So far it's a bit of a let down from my previous optimism but I haven't worked with it for long enough yet, plus energyman from the Gentoo forums has suggested some programs from the KDE overlay so I might have to dust off layman and stablize KDE.

Also, everything looks too... large. I have it at 1280x1024 but it has the appearance of being at 1024x768. Weird!

• 26th February 2009

• KDE4

After trying the truly terrible abomination that was KDE 4.0 a while back while I was on Ubuntu, I never thought i'd give KDE the light of day ever again but yesterday I found myself downloading what seemed to be pretty much all of KDE after an upgrade of my whole system to Gentoo ~x86_64 testing (event though I had -kde -qt in USE) so I thought "what the hell". I needed a Samba network browser that worked anyway and seeing how Nautilus is possibly the worst thing on the planet for that I dug konqueror out.

I was *majorly* surprised!

I have never been a massive fan of KDE, I always found it looked like it had been designed by a child with crayons. Its sickly sweet usage of reds and greens was enough to make your eyes bleed and it made Gnome's greys look positively beautiful in comparison. Then Ubuntu came along and changed the way Gnome looked and felt, it was like a breath of fresh air. It was slick, fast and thoroughly easy to use. Unfortunately I soon found out that it was less to do with Gnome itself and more to do with Ubuntu's excellent team who design it for basic users in mind and when I got back to Gentoo after a hiatus of 18 months or so I found Gnome less easy to use and that basic things I was used to (extra programs in their system folder and packages that were installed by default) weren't there.

Anyway, all this never really mattered with Gentoo because i've always just used a WM (usually either FVWM, Fluxbox or (most recently) Openbox).

Anyway, after installing 400 or so packages I had a fully functional KDE 4.2 desktop and the changes they have made have been significant. Gone are the childish crayon colours and in have come a slick and sleek dark scheme that puts Vista to shame and although I like size and configurability of the window managers I usually run I can see the appeal of KDE now.

Stability seems to be a problem. 10 mins after I first used it everything crashed and KDE's crash report tool isn't as good as Gnome's "Bug Buddy" in Ubuntu but I think that is just more of Ubuntu's configuration rather than a problem of KDE's. The menu also needs some work doing to it. It looks good and they have made a massive leap insofar that it is completely different to any menu I have used before but if you dont know exactly where a program is it is quite difficult to find because the first couple of menus it shows are too small and gives no idea as to where a specific program is located. If the list of menu options was larger then it would be easier to navigate and quicker to find the program you actually want. An example is the "Games" menu.

All in all i'm impressed. It is a great leap forward for KDE and if Gnome 2.6/2.8/3.0 can get like it I will be pleased.

I'm not quite ready to swap my OpenBox for it yet though ;)