meet the new desktop, same as the old desktop

By basd on Feb 21, 2009 | In kde4, linux, opensuse, gnome, -arghhh!!

So, I'm looking at this really cool desktop where everything is sort of where I want it and everything is stable and works.

...

(Would that it stay that way ...)

Nothing here but a vast sea of darkness, a couple of desktop icons, four thin panels around the edges and a hidden cairo-dock.

Oh, yeah, and the very nice superkaramba aero-monitor (but it costs me 2 deg. F CPU heat to run it). Also Kwin effects.

So, you would say "life is good," though where did the plasma widgets go?

Oh, I could run plasma in my aforementioned "plasome" configuration, but why? All it gives me is aggravation, and that well beyond my arrghh aggravation threshold.

As I've occasionally mentioned -- since the release of KDE 4 beta in fact -- those of us out here trying to implement linux for actual daily working solutions kind of like "stability." If I put an icon or widget somewhere, I would like it to be there, in precisely the configuration I left it, the next time I use the computer. Much fun as easter egg hunting is, it's sort of an efficiency thing to know how the desktop is set up without having to think about it.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not what the kde 4 basher bashers think. I LIKE new software. I like to try new software. I like to use new software, especially if I get added benefits and added functionality. As I've mentioned before, the new tools, added stability and functionality of linux marches steadily forward. It's important to keep trying things to see what's new and what works.

Case in point -- Okular has steadily and quietly become an ever better pdf tool. This is a long way from xpdf and ghostscript. Browsers rock. Database management rocks. Email solutions become ever better. SSHFS locks your webserver transparently into your machine as a local drive. The awesomeness never ends -- especially if you remember what computing was like 10, 20 years ago.

Which is hard to do, actually. I loaded Windows95 into Virtualbox. What a quaint, amusing and obsolete desktop that was.

And then again, what a rube goldberg collection of nonsense it kicked aside when it was first released. We were running memory managers, desktop managers (remember Desqview? Of course not), networking software, and then our application software -- all from different vendors, with an enormity of problems getting everything up and running. Think it's frustrating to find linux drivers for hardware? We tried IBM's OS/2 -- and absolutely nothing in our systems would run because there were no drivers (and no support). Win95 worked out of the box.

Ah, the good old days. Saturdays at the convention center, browsing isles of disembodied hardware, looking for the new computer toy that simplify all the headaches. If only things would just work!

Thank you for visiting and have a pleasant tomorrow.