Dion Moult Seriously who ever reads this description.

KDE 4.1.2 in main tree!

On 9 October 2008 with 5 comments

For those who don’t know, KDE is a desktop environment (a GUI – graphical user interface) that can be used with Linux. In Linux, you choose what GUI you want, if you want one in the first place :)

The KDE v4.1.2 has moved from the overlay to the main portage tree on October the third. This should see a lot more people upgrading to the KDE 4 series. Quite shockingly, most of the screenshots you find of KDE 4 are for 4.0 and 4.1. I’ve decided to show you guys my desktop setup.

I am a KDE person, whenever I’m not using ratpoison, I use KDE. True, there is always Firefox, The GIMP, and OpenOffice, but Firefox can look great with Chromifox, The GIMP could use some gtk-engines, and OpenOffice knows well to look native everywhere. In my opinion. KDE looks pretty. Because I already have comfort zones with a large variety of console applications (irssi, mutt, vim, ncftp, devtodo, links, mplayer, etc), I’m not restricted to having to use a specific GUI because the majority of my programs use similar libraries. (Yes, you can run everything at once, but that’ll just take up unnecessary space). Therefore, the things that really sell a GUI to me (WM or DE – those stand for Window Managers and Desktop Environments), is their speed, beauty, and choice of inbuilt-apps. Ok, speed sounds reasonable, beauty also sounds reasonable (though ratpoison contradicts that sharply – it’s merely because, especially when rendering 3D images or watching movies, a bulky GUI just gets in your way), but what about inbuilt-apps? I love trying out new apps. If a DE includes applications that arouse my curiousity, I like it. I like seeing things packaged so that they can accomodate any purpose I have in mind. Such examples are when one day I look under the “Education” menu of my programs list and see cool things such as graph plotters, physics simulators, 3D globes and even a planetarium. Ooooh :D

Ok, here’s my current set up. It changes almost every couple of days, so this’ll quickly get out of date.

Plasmoids are folder view, post-it notes, dictionary, and picture frame. Desktop theme is Elegance (which I believe looks better than the default Oxygen). Plasmoids on my panel are KDE launcher, removable devices, desktops, task viewer, system tray, battery monitor, and the wonderful binary clock.

Wow, I’ve been giving some picture heavy posts lately. It’s time to write something interesting for a change.

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