http://norman.walsh.name/2006/07/13/desktops 9 68 2006-07-13T14:49:29-04:00 $Date: 2006-07-14 10:59:14 -0400 (Fri, 14 Jul 2006) $ Norman Walsh 2006 Norman Walsh From Gnome to KDE and back again: a tale of Linux desktops and the (mostly) pleasant experience of installing everyone's favorite distribution-du-jour, Ubuntu. Terry Allen Yeah, we could do that, but it would open Pandora's can of worms. I've used Gnome for quite a while now, years at least. Gnome's philosophy, as I understand it, is to make things as simple as possible. Practically, this means choosing reasonable defaults and providing relatively little in the way of configuration options. I guess I can understand that, but it definitely grates against my hacker nature sometimes. I like having knobs to turn and levers to pull. I'm idiosyncratic and I want the machine to suit my idiosyncrasies, not vice versa. Sometimes changing things requires a trip into the registrygconf-editor (I want Emacs keybindings in Gnome. I don't need Nautilus on my desktop, thank you very much). Sometimes it just isn't possible.

Well, a few weeks ago, I threw a hissy fit. I'm not proud, but that's what I did. I wanted to change the Gnome screen saver so that it would use some of my own images in a slide show. In particular, I wanted to use these images `find /share/Backup/flickr -type f -name "*_o.jpg" -print`. Now, I admit, that's a little unusual, but I figured it couldn't be that hard. What I discovered was that the Gnome slide show screen saver requires all images to be in a single directory (not even a subtree, but a single, flat directory), and that that directory must be named “~/Pictures”! That just pushes one of my buttons. Somehow I don't mind the Unix convention of “dot files” in the home directory for configuration files, so I accept that I'm not entirely rational about this. But “~/Pictures”, like the Windows convention of “My This” and “My That” just makes my blood boil. It's my directory, they're my files, I get to decide what names I want to use for them! So I thumbed my nose at Gnome and installed KDE.

KDE is nice. Very configurable. There are lots of options and it's easy to establish a personal setup. The screen saver wouldn't actually do what I wanted, exactly, but it got a little closer. I could specify any directory I wanted and it would look recursively through that directory and it's descendants for images. So I used KDE for a while. Then I did some low-level hacking. It's hard to break Linux, but it's not impossible. Between an attempt to install some alpha video drivers so that I could get Google Earth to work and hacking about with IrDA, I mangled something. The ACPI functions stopped working. The machine ran, but I couldn't suspend. I lived without it for a while, even through a road trip, but eventually decided I couldn't go on. That meant a complete re-install. And when the time came, I went back to Gnome. Sorry KDE fans (not that it's any skin off your nose, of course). At the end of the day, I just didn't see a whole lot to choose between them so it was basically an aesthetic choice. I like the look of GTK apps better than Qt apps. (Yes, of course, I know that I can run Gnome apps under KDE and vice-versa, but the KDE desktop looks Qt-ish and the Gnome desktop looks GTK-ish.)

As many folks have observed, including me, installing Ubuntu is pretty much a breeze. It all just works right out of the box. That said, I did notice a few small problems this time around. You are backing up your crontab file, right? I wasn't, my full system backup excluded /var/spool in the interest saving a few bytes. That means I've lost my crontab and it'll take me a while to figure out everything that's missing. Someone suggested running xscreensaver instead of the Gnome screen saver. It seemed to sortof work, but never powered down the panel so I went back to Gnome screen saver. $@%#!? ~/Pictures and all. Make sure you fix all the Java links in /etc/alternatives after you install Sun's JDK (which you can now do with apt-get). Otherwise, you'll still be running the buggy gcj stuff and inexplicable Bad Things will happen. And finally, what the $@%#!? is up with all the keychain options!? There's gnome-gpg, gnupg-agent, ssh-agent, gnome-keyring, and keychain (at least!). It took a whole bunch of undirected thrashing about to get things working. And don't ask me what's actually working because I'm not really sure (though it appears to be gpg-agent). It all runs just peachy again now.

[Updated: 14 July 2006] Lots of good comments. As I said, my reaction to the screen saver issue was really an over reaction (i.e. a hissy fit). As Paul W. Frields and an anonymous commenter point out, there are workarounds of various sorts for the ~/Pictures issues. And I'll have to check out F-Spot too. It's not that the screen saver is somehow intolerable, it was just the last straw. Other annoyances: I hook up my CF card reader and Gnome tells me that it's detected a photo card and asks me some question about adding the photos to an album. So I check the “Always perform this action” checkbox and select the “Ignore” button (no, I don't need you to manage my photos, thank you very much). But does it subsequently ignore the card? Of course not, it ignored me and asks the same damn question every time. Or how about the “Disk Mounter” panel applet? I have two encrypted partitions which it insists on putting in the panel. I promise you, those partitions are not removable in either a physical or logical sense. At least not while the Panel is running! Those are just the two annoyances that come to mind right now, I'm sure there are at least a handful more. Yes, I should write them down when they occur. Yes, I should file bug reports. Heck, this is open source, I should submit patches! But the days are short and the my “todo” list often reminds me of the Nile, flowing from Lake Victoria and winding out of sight across my desk. One final note. I did, in fact, consider abandoning both Gnome and KDE and just running Fvwm natively as I used to. And I did for a few minutes. Then I decided I really did want some of the conveniences of a modern desktop. But you know, if I find a few minutes to work out how to get on screen feedback for my laptop keys (like volume) and something like the disk mounter applet, I might just try again. But for the moment, there are things higher up on my todo list!