Aside from that, I’ve been trying to debug why KWin with compositing enabled causing all these crashes and makes X go unresponsive (such that I have to force shutdown). So what I’ve learned is how to use the SysRq key (which is a lifesaver) and also how to abstain from the newer NVIDIA drivers. A word of warning for KDE users, do not upgrade to 180.29 or 180.35 nvidia-drivers, it is full of bugs and requires expert pest control services. Thankfully with the SysRq key I won’t cause my filesystem to bork (as people watching me on Twitter found out today at 4:30AM) and with the added hope of being able to just restart X (alt-sysrq-k) things now seem more livable.

On unrelated news, I decided to see if I could copy Vista’s look. I didn’t really make much of an effort (hence why my panel is untouched and I didn’t make a “reflection” image as well as my icon theme not changed) but here’s what I came up with after a while:

I currently run a rather Mac-ish setup, as can be seen here. The theme is Bespin. Tada:

Oh, and just because this is Linux, everything is possible:

I hope giving you pictures might make up for the fact I missed a post :) I’ll post something with a bit more essence next time.  (Click on those to see full size and true awesomness detail)

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Windows 7 – and what army?

and here’s a link to the Bloomberg article that supports it:

Bloomberg – Click

Oh, and to keep things interesting, here is a screenshot leaked for Windows 7. Apparently they’re going for a clean design and less 3D whizz. In my opinion, KDE still looks better (and the best thing is, you can customise it to look like Windows if you really want to). Compare for yourself? (Click for larger picture)

Oh, and even more hilarious is how their new taskbar at the bottom looks like an almost exact ripoff KDE. Take a look at KDE 3.5 (yes, I know it’s the old KDE) and compare. Launcher, nice big quickstart icons, (ok, the workspaces are missing) task manager, system tray, clock, and even something that looks like the hider arrow on the right.

What can I say? First they steal Mac’s visual effects (ok, Linux stole it too, but we improved it and we’re free software) and made it look worse, then they’re about a year behind on desktop widgets (which Linux has had regularly for quite some time, and Mac same), and well, they still haven’t caught up with the idea of multiple workspaces. Shame. Microsoft. Shame.

For comparisons sake here’s my latest desktop screenshot (which changes almost every week).

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