My new KDE desktop
Posted by Mathieu Jobin Thu, 04 May 2006 16:39:00 GMT
I changed my KDE desktop feels, I like it so much better :) And feel much more productive since then. it's been about a month now. and I totally love it.
I got rid of everything, make it simpler looking and giving me more screen space.
1 - kicker
kicker is too large and takes too much of my desktop space for things I don't need that often. making kicker smaller bugs me even more. because than I miss kicker space to put my favorite applets. some applets are annoying in their small version. but some applets are worse when kicker is vertically positioned.
solution ? getting rid of it. hard. with so many programs using the systray. I can't really. Hide it ? I always hated auto-hide, but still worth the try. And I made it so its fine.
I wanted hidden, easily accessible but not over-annoying like hitting a edge by accident would raise it. The top-right corner of the screen is busy for the close button. so I choose the top-left corner of the screen as a hotcorner to raise the kicker. I moved the systrays icons to the left, because systray icons are really the most important reason why I still need kicker. And I don't want to ride my mouse from the top-left corner to my systray at the other end. so I then reordered all my applets by how often I am accessing them. putting the clock on the full right as I am not clicking on it very often. the K menu that I use maybe once a month. and the Garbage not so far as I am trying it out but so far, not appealing enough.
2 - desktop icons.
actually I like them, I press F11 to show my desktop and I use them very often. but recently I've been hitting on a bug that makes my desktop and kwin crash when I use the context menu of a desktop icon. and I don't like when it happens and I can't wait for the bug to be fixed. so I removed desktop icons. its nice to see my desktop backgrounds without a mess of icons on it.
3 - task switcher.
I use kompose, with a hotcorner on the bottom-right and F9/F10 hotkeys. its perfect. I'm also ALT-TAB addict but I like using kompose a lot.
4 - flaws ?
only one so far, I don't get changes notification from kwin. so I need to close kopete window or else I forget to answer my friends. its a big problem I'm trying to deal with. if you got any idea. I wish kompose could wake me up ;)
4a - changes notification system
and two more requests: 4b - get the trash applet a better tooltip , 4c - titlebar buttons are just a 22 years old technlogy.
got solutions or comments for me ? my ears are wide open.
