greyduck.net

Dear KDE,

I’ve been using you as my desktop environment on every one of my Linux machines for several years now, and generally speaking I’m quite pleased with the experience. This is, admittedly, largely due to the fact that I don’t push you very hard. I’m an easy guy to work for. All I ask is that you show me some icons, menus and give me easily workable window dressing with which to manipulate my software. Oh, and I’m quite fond of having a good, well-integrated terminal program. These are things you’ve all done quite well.

Sure, I haven’t always been a fan. I used to be all about the Enlightenment. Then that went kind of haywire, what with themes going crazy every few days and the whole death-of-EFM thing. I turned to the two big alternatives, then, not because I think the lightweight window managers aren’t up to the job, but because I’ve always been a big fan of the pretty. KDE 1.x was my salvation, for a while. Then came the 2.x series. What a mess that was, eh? I ended up in GNOME-land for a while, and was in fact quite vehemently against KDE, vowing never to touch it again. But of course the 3.x release came highly recommended from several people whose opinions I respect, including a couple who also had been burned. I gave it a try, and never looked back.

So I hope you don’t mind if I vent just a bit of frustration, here, because there are still a few things that desperately need fixing.

I understand that all software can be quirky, and highly-complex open-source software even more so. But is it too much to ask for you not to blow up in my face every time I make the mistake of actually wanting to tinker with the look and feel of my desktop? I’m not in there poking around at arcane configuration files, mind you. I’m just checking and unchecking options you freely provide me, right there in your own “Control Center.” Why should enabling a sound option mean that my desktop wallpaper and icons go away? Can you explain that one to me, please? And while I’m on the subject of sound, what’s up with that? Why is it that the only way I can reliably enjoy music on this computer is to disable the aRts sound system? That makes a whole lot of no sense, if you know what I mean. And here’s an idea. How about not breaking completely when I try to use the much-vaunted integrated network browsing features? I’d like to actually see that work “as advertised,” thank you very much.

All the cute bouncing-icon wait-cursor eyecandy in the world can’t hold me if the actual practical functionality doesn’t work. All I ask is that you please consider that in the future, and pretty please do something about making sure that changing an icon preference doesn’t mean having to restart my desktop environment. Not to make idle threats, but you do know that Enlightenment DR-17 is approaching a usable state, right?

Yours, etc,
Me.

I couldn’t resist not posting yesterday or most of today so I could enjoy the fact that the “posting frequency” indicator (down the left-side column a ways) read zeros for Week, Month and Year.

Yes, that’s the kind of geek I am. If I was the truly dedicated sort of geek, and by “dedicated” I mean “not lazy,” I’d have ensured that that the Month and Year indicators read 100%. But… I’m too lazy for that.

Hey, I couldn’t do this last year. The old version of the website code didn’t have the posting frequency indicator…

Did you know that the NCP utilities for Linux are capable of mounting Netware 5 server volumes via IP as well as IPX? Up until this morning, I didn’t. I’ve been jumping through hoops for years, setting things up so that my Linux machines can see the fileserver. As of now, I have a lot fewer hoops to jump through.

For what it’s worth, the trick is to use the “-A xx.xx.xx.xx” option (or the “ipserver=xx.xx.xx.xx” in /etc/fstab if you’re doing it like I am). That tells the ncp code to use UDP instead of IPX. You still have to supply the server name, though.

Nifty. Damned nifty. Removing complexity is a good thing.