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Snit

On 6/21/15, 8:18 PM, in article , "rbowman"
wrote:

On 06/21/2015 06:43 PM, Snit wrote:
Curious what it is about KDE that you liked. I have used it some, and show
examples in my videos below, and thought it was an utter disaster.

NOT trying to talk you out of it... not at all - just curious what you like
about it.

It's just a desktop. I don't ask much of it and stay away from all the
eye candy crap. I'd also used mwm, fvwm, and iceWM, although they are
window managers rather than desktops although I've always found the
distinction blurry. About 15 years ago I used RedHat with the
Gnome/Sawfish setup if you want to talk about disasters.

The truth is you use what you are used to, and I switched to SuSE after
RedHat and SuSE defaults to KDE. Technically, I'd rather work with Qt
than Gtk+ although truth be told most of my GUI work is with Motif for
legacy reasons.

I am one of the few who had not "what I was used to" - or at least less of
it. I did know the old Apple IIe systems, but I got a job working in a
computer lab and was there to assist people on Macs, PCs (DOS systems at the
time), and UNIX systems. I learned them all at the same time - though worked
less with the UNIX systems than the others.

I am not a programmer, but I teach and do tech work. I have a passion for
GUI issues and how one system compares to others in terms of benefiting
usability (productivity, efficiency, and error-reduction).

In other words: we look at the systems from somewhat different angles. And
that is fine.

I like KMail and KNode although lately I've been using Thunderbird for
its cross platform capability.

I used to use Thunderbird some and suggest it for my Windows clients... but
too many had issues with its rules and forwarding and more. Same with
Firefox... it seemed like it had a lot of promise but Mozilla seems to never
quite get to working out the quirks (even more so than other similar
software designers - in other words, they all have quirks).

If you look at my work machine on most days there will be 8 desktops
with KMail and Firefox on two of them. The balance are Konsoles and gVim
windows. Actually, my windows boxes are very similar although they don't
have eight desktops. I understand Windows 10 finally is going to do that
right. In addition, the Windows box might have Visual Studio and SQL
Server Management Studio open if I'm messing with databases. Rarely will
ArcDesktop be up for ESRI manipulation.

By desktops I assume you mean virtual desktops. I think for most people this
is a feature which is not much of a benefit, at least how it has generally
been done. For some types of power users, though, who benefit from being
able to configure multiple windows to open and close together, it has a
benefit.

OS X has a decent virtual desktop system with the added bonus that it ties
into full-screen applications. I see people using this part of it more more
than any other. Even then they tend to make a program go full screen and
then reduce it back to a window to get to other programs instead of swapping
"Spaces".

For the power user it does not, by default, let you name the "Spaces" - but
thankfully third party solutions exist to add that.

Okular, Foxit, LibreOffice or something else might be open if someone
insists on sending me documentation in pdf, doc, docx, xls, tiff, or
some other funky format. I do not create documents in any of those
formats; if it ain't a gVim plain text file it don't happen.

Sounds very "old school" - which is fine. And given that usage I can see
where Linux could work well.

I do a lot with screencasting - and not just recording the screen but doing
editing. Much of this is simply not possible on Linux (or would be much
harder): this includes being able to - in post production - hide or show the
mouse, resize the mouse, and even swap the mouse for a new image. Makes a
big difference in helping people to see where the mouse is. Also allows me
to resize the canvas to the size of the front window, show or hide key
strokes, etc. Just based on that being a common need of mine I could not use
Linux as my primary OS: even my videos of Linux are done with Linux running
in a VM so I can use those features (and then I cannot snap to the Linux
windows - the tool sees the VM as the window). But I can swap the mouse,
etc.

I also work with more advanced documents - my "Word Processor" comparison
video shows adding images and rotating them and the like. This is common in
many types of documents and, if possible at all, much harder on Linux.

So as much as I would like to be able to use Linux as a desktop system it
simply is not mature enough for my needs.

For the most part a working programmer is not representative of the
general computer user although we sometimes watch stupid cat videos.

LOL! Yes... and for that (web surfing) Linux is also a fine choice. Heck,
look at ChromeOS - while it has become a bit more, it is still largely a web
kiost (from what I know - I have not worked with it much).

--
* Mint MATE Trash, Panel, Menu: http://youtu.be/C0y74FIf7uE
* Mint KDE bugs or Easter eggs? http://youtu.be/CU-whJQvtfA
* Mint KDE working with folders: http://youtu.be/7C9nvniOoE0
* Mint KDE creating files: http://youtu.be/N7-fZJaJUv8
* Mint KDE help: http://youtu.be/3ikizUd3sa8
* Mint KDE general navigation: http://youtu.be/t9y14yZtQuI
* Easy on OS X / Hard on Linux: http://youtu.be/D3BPWANQoIk
* OS / Word Processor Comparison: http://youtu.be/w6Qcl-w7s5c