KDE

Since I became a regular Linux user around 2003 I was a KDE user. I stuck with it on half a dozen distros along the way. On a whim, two weeks ago, I switched to Gnome and haven't been sorry, yet. This post specifically focuses on KDE within Kubuntu, compared to Gnome in Ubuntu.

Many of these are personal observations which have lead to my switch. It's a rant at times but I want to say very clearly that these comments concern the software and I appreciate the effort of all the volunteers on KDE and Kubuntu very much.

If you have an amplifier (or something similar) with a remote and your computer attached to it, there are probably several buttons that don't do anything in this configuration. In my case, it's the buttons available to control a CD or tape deck. Wouldn't it be neat to repurpose those?

If you're running a recent version of KDE on a netbook you might not like that the default setting for Akonadi (the new PIM storage running on MySQL embedded) has a default setting for ib_logfiles at 64Mb. If you have a look into ~/.local/share/akonadi you might see files like ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 (those two at least in my case) in the db_data subdirectory. You might also have seen the mysql.conf file in the parent directory. It then helps if you—unlike me—actually read the comments at the top of the file because you'd see the following:

Yesterday the 4.0.2 ebuilds for KDE entered the portage tree and the changelog indicated that panel height was now variable. So I couldn't resist any longer and switched to my favorite environment. This morning enough packages had compiled to give it a try and it's working really great. The system is responsive and most everything fits nicely on the screen.

KDE has a neat little feature called "Input Actions". Here you can define certain triggers to do certain things, such as keyboard inputs, DCOP calls or just running executables.

Combine that with a Macbook remote which has some keys assigned to it via xmodmap and two clicks in the control center can change from one group of actions for the available keys to the next.