[PLUG] where can I get a sane KDE?
Eric Wilhelm
scratchcomputing at gmail.com
Mon Feb 12 01:16:55 UTC 2007
Hi all,
Today I found myself wondering how long it will be before we start
having desktop environment "distributions" with specific mixes of
stability, defaults, etc -- the way we have linux distributions now
(e.g. ubuntu is not for everyone.)
I really like the kde window manager, kmail, konqueror, and quite a few
other parts of the system.
Unfortunately, when I aptitude upgrade, certain parts seem to come with
new and improved silliness almost daily (it's more like every 6 months
-- I don't really want to be thinking about my desktop environment
daily.)
A couple (few?) years ago, there was a problem with the alt+tab box not
showing all of the windows (I have about 40 running right now, but
that's just on the laptop), though it would at least pan to allow you
to alt+tab to any one of them. This was fixed by replacing it with a
vertical stack which now makes any minimized windows completely
inaccessible via alt+shift+tab (it just truncates the stack.) Yay.
That must be the developers telling me that I've got too many irons in
the fire.
Recently, the very-useful feature of being able to spin through a window
*group* with the mouse wheel turned into the much-less-useful "spin
through *all* windows with the mouse wheel".
Today, the particular ridiculousity that prompted me to write a rant is
discovering that Ctrl+Shift+F5 is a hotkey used by kde for the
oh-so-frequently-needed "switch to desktop 17" action. WTF? I really
doubt that having this enabled could be considered a "reasonable
default" given that most people won't be running 17 desktops *and* if
they were, they could not be expected to guess that hotkey without
going to look in the config (at which point, they could easily enable
it.)
This is not a new category of annoyances though, since the "increase
font" hotkey still (IIRC) defaults to Ctrl+"Plus", which literally
means Ctrl+Shift+= because the plus is the shifted character on that
key (though, maybe not in every country.) Similarly, the default
"Alt+Click to drag a window" can get in the way until you realize that
it is yet another overly-helpy default to be disabled.
Of course, I'm not switching to gnome. I could point out about 20 major
issues there that would make me pull way more hair than the few weird
nits I have with kde. I've messed with several of the other wm's, but
I typically end up being dissappointed with something major (like the
ability to build hierarchical multi-key shortcut sequences.)
So, am I alone in that I use kde, have 100+ windows open at a time (no,
I don't like multiple desktops, I prefer layers and the grouped
taskbar) and don't want perfectly useful and reasonable features to get
phased-out in favor of increasingly less useful and reasonable ones?
Most of the issues I have are in the window manager, so suggestions of
how to get or setup a reasonably powerful and configurable replacement
are welcome. It just needs to support xinerama, 100+ open windows,
hierarchical hotkeys, grouped applications, and a decent system tray.
It helps if I don't need to spend an entire day figuring out how to
configure it.
Is there a better solution than building from source and maintaining a
custom set of patches? Maybe "Joe's KDE sane-ification release" or
something? I've tried bug reports, but typically get answers like
"just use multiple desktops" or "what's wrong with Ctrl++ ?" and it
seems they generally don't take you seriously unless you compiled trunk
this morning. I really do like kde, but the nits seem to be
accumulating and/or regressing to the point that I think I have to do
something or else freeze everything at Sarge (!) until I find a better
answer.
Thanks,
Eric
--
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.
--George Bernard Shaw
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