Switching to Gnome

2009-05-03 (permalink tags: , )

I'm giving Gnome a try. I switched from Gnome to KDE around Mandrake 7.0, which is a long time ago. I always preferred how everything was working well together in KDE; with dcop to automate tasks and Konqueror's web-shortcuts, I had a very efficient desktop. Then came KDE 4.

KDE 4.0 lacked so many features that I switched back to KDE 3 instantly. KDE 4.1 had essentially most of that I needed but it was still kind of buggy and slow, but KDE 4.2 promised to fix all of that.

I don't know if it's KDE or Ubuntu who screwed up but Kubuntu 9.04 is simply unusable. It's way too slow for my EEE 1000HE and, the new KNetwork manager won't recall passwords and won't even tell you what access point it's trying to connect to when it prompts you out of nowhere for a new key. KDed randomly crash, I can't type a full path when I save-as in both Konqueror and KMail and worst of all, all applications are fill with garbage when you flip them with alt-tab.

Oh, and Amarok 2 sucks. Ok, that last one is easy to fix but I'm switching anyway.

I want to try something new and I want a fresh view of the other desktop environment. First contact is not smooth so far. As an example, gnome-terminal and metacity have many keyboard shortcuts that clash with Emacs basic navigation. Emacs come with bindings for a lot of shortcuts so it's expected that the desktop will clash on some obscure functionality that is not used too often, like kill-sexp, but clashing on forward-word is sure to break my pace. Jean helped me get started. Let's see how it goes.

Comments

2009-05-04 00:10:09 by Fred (direct link | reply)

I've been very happily using Fluxbox on my EEE900. It's nice and fast, and I can use the K or G apps when I need them.

2009-05-04 05:57:47 by Yannick (direct link | reply)

Yeah a few friends of mine are on Fluxbox and the seem to like it. I should give it a try, especially on my underpowered little laptop. Thanks for the recommendation.

2009-05-15 02:25:04 by Alex (direct link | reply)

You can disable keyboard shortcuts in gnome-terminal. Just go in Edit ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts and uncheck Disable all menu access keys. That works great for me. Also, you might want to check out emacs-snapshot-gtk, which is well integrated with GNOME.

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