So I’m still using KDE surprisingly, and actually liking it. Finally got most of my keybinds working so I can work efficiently. I found KDE’s ability to easily pass key presses to a specific window quite nifty, allowing me to easily map all my multimedia keys to work with XMMS.
I got around to installing kbluetooth yesterday and was absolutely shocked at the result. My bluetooth actually worked. This was extremely pleasant for me as I have been disappointed with bluetooth in Gentoo for a long time. I effortlessly was able to send a file over to my phone and it just worked after confirming on my phone’s end.
Still using Claws Mail for email for now until I find a better alternative one day. Kmail pulls in too many dependencies for my taste currently and it doesn’t seem to offer anything that would cause me to switch over from claws mail.
I have to say kwin’s “Present all windows” feature thats normally the upper left edge of the screen is extremely nifty. Reminds me a lot of OS X’s expose feature. Handy for when I have 50 terminals floating around and I don’t feel like alt-tabbing for the next 10 minutes searching for the correct terminal or whatever program I’m using.
Klipper has been causing some love/hate so far. While its history function is extremely nifty, I sometimes find myself copying something only to find I can’t paste it for whatever reason. I enabled the option to keep the selection/copy buffer synchronized and the annoyance seems to have disappeared for the most part.
Plasma has been a bit crashy on and off so far. Seems to be something to do with the notification area. I wouldn’t find it as annoying if my applications would rejoin the newly spawned panel instead of floating about on the workspace. NetworkManager, Opera, and Claws Mail being the most notorious for not rejoining the panel after it crashes. Of course, the ideal solution would be to fix the crashing all together. I haven’t figured out a reliable way to introduce the crash yet, so I’m hoping it will just go away on its own.
#1 by zak89 on November 16, 2009 - 6:32 pm
Nice post! I tend to be the type that uses my desktop’s native apps for everything (i.e, if on KDE, I use AmaroK, and if on GNOME, Rythmbox) but it’s interesting to hear someone using their “favorite” apps for each task; reminds me of my Fluxbox days; XMMS, Thunar, Conky…
Suprised about plasma’s ‘crashiness”. What version of KDE is Gentoo at? I’m using 4.3.3 on openSUSE, and I’ve been almost shocked at it’s stablility. It almost feels “too stable” (of course, I probably feel this way because previous versions had a long ways to go in the stability sector). It just keeps ticking. The only crash I’ve experienced was when I launched ChoqoK (after not running it for a while) and it tried to use the plasma notifications to “notify” me of over a hundred Twitter updates. I quicky learned to keep that ChoqoK option disabled.’
Again, nice post.
#2 by Ken on November 17, 2009 - 11:44 pm
Gentoo’s at KDE version 4.3.3 for now. It seems most of my plasma crashes have gone away for now, so I guess perhaps some update fixed it. I’m just glad it’s stable now.