Interesting Stuff

I’ve decided that this summer, I’m going to redo most of my computer system. This evening, I took the leap and switched from KDE to Xfce. For you non-Linux types (shame on you!) KDE is one of the two most popular desktop environments (Gnome is the other big one). A desktop environment, near as I can tell, does all graphical things except the graphics themselves – start bar, drag-and-drop, dropdown menus, minimizing/maximizing windows, transparency, etc. I’ve been using KDE since its nice and friendly and a good way to start out. However, the only KDE applications I use were Konsole and 3 games, all of which are replaceable. KDE comes with all sorts of other applications and all sorts of things that I never used. On the other hand, it didn’t handle my virtual desktops the way I wanted it to. After looking around for a while, I decided to try Xfce, and I really like it. While not perfect, it has a lot of good points: it’s small, fast, doesn’t come with a bunch of crap, doesn’t use many resources, supports virtual desktops well, can almost completely be controlled from the keyboard, and is easily customized. It’s not perfect, however:

• the bar that lists my programs will only span one of my monitors (though I hear this will be fixed in an upcoming release)
• it comes with no man pages, though everything has a “–help” option
• it doesn’t display programs it’s trying to start (this was a great KDE feature, as I could find out if anything crashed before displaying anything)
• the “start bar” is about twice as big as the icons in it
• it doesn’t have a fuzzy clock.

If my 5th biggest complaint is that it doesn’t have a fuzzy clock, I think I’ve got a winner!

For those of you who can’t live without your favourite KDE/Gnome application, Xfce supports all applications from both of them, though it will start up a bit slower. This is one of the many wonderful things you can customize in it!

So here’s the plan for the rest of the summer:

• Switch the default shell from bash to zsh, and remove bash
• Switch the default editor from emacs to vim, and remove emacs
• Work up the courage to remove KDE entirely (I haven’t done this yet)
• Use more of the hotkeys on my keyboard. Ideally, I should have a graphical system that doesn’t require a mouse, though I doubt I can get away with that entirely.
• Configure my printer correctly (yes, I know it’s been a year and I still haven’t done this)

So here’s a screenshot of my current setup. It wouldn’t surprise me if that changed soon, though.