Linux's Desktop Environments are Failing It

Don't get me wrong, the current one (at least GNOME) is fine. Here's the whole thing:

Around a week ago I was thinking about Windows 7 and how much improvements to the UI it has and how innovative it is and I started wondering why Linux isn't as innovative. I was about to blog about it but good thing I didn't.

Just a few days back I came across an article about GNOME 3.0 and it said that they'll have a major UI change, it said they'll make GNOME Shell the main interface, I got excited 'cause I really like revolutionary stuff, so I started googling GNOME Shell, sadly, it looked awful and pretty weird!

That's when I realized that Linux developers ARE innovative, just not in the right path, there are some cool stuff (rather, a lot), but they're really screwing it with their desktop environments.

Don't get me wrong, GNOME now is awesome, just yesterday I was playing a video at the back, chatting on FB in firefox, and chatting with another friend in Pidgin, all at the same time; I reduced the opacity of both Firefox and Pidgin so I could still watch the video. Now that's cool!

The thing is that both KDE and GNOEME are failing, I used to use KDE 3.x and I was very happy with it (I used to even despise GNOME a bit), but after KDE 4 was released and I tried it, I just didn't like it, and after all major distros shifted to KDE 4, I had to shift to GNOME, now I like GNOME, it's fine.. But it looks like GNOME will screw things up with version 3.. At the same Windows 7 comes with a lot of improvements to its interface, I'm seriously considering shifting back to Windows once Windows 7 is released.

KDE4

I moved to rawhide a few days ago because I wanted to try KDE4.

At first I had some problems because I didn't install all the related packages, actually, I had a lot of problems, ranging from 3 crashes an hour to missing icons.

After I installed those packages, crashes started to happen less often, some icons just showed, but I still didn't like it.

Then I started messing around with whatever settings I have (many settings are missing and won't be implemented until 4.1), and that helped the desktop look better, I had gray around the panel, boring decorations, etc... But now, I have cool glassy edges around the panel, with semi transparent decorations :)

Then it was time to fix the sound problem, I headed to #fedora-kde and asked, thanks to the folks there I have the sound working fine now.

I still have some problems such as not being able to use shortcut keys, and some other problems that I can't think of right now.

In short, KDE4 is OK, not as great as I expected it to be though, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone at the moment, maybe later when KDE4 is actually released it'll be more stable. I also find not being able to configure the panel a bit annoying, yet bearable.

I have to say that the only thing I really liked in it is the code folding feature in KWrite :D

New year's eve

This is probably the geekiest way to spend new year's eve: Reading a tutorial on QT programming on Linux :P

I'll make learning QT/KDE programming my resolution for 2008 :)

Happy new year!

Infinity-24

Fedora 8 will be shipped with a theme called Infinity, unfortunately, that feature does not exist under KDE.

That is why, I decided to give it a shot, so I created a Perl script that does just that.

When the script is run, it gets the time, parses the hour, and then changes the background using dcop.

You can find the script Here.

Nodoka KDE Window Decoration

Today, I made a KDE implementation of Nodoka window decoration using DeKorator.

You can download it from Here.

It feels so good to contribute to a distro and then use whatever you've done.

YAY!