On moving to KDE4

I am a Gnome suer. Have religiously stuck to it for all these years. It is not that I did not venture out into the KDE domain..I did. And the first time I had, I had found it quite uncomfortable to work with. But, with so much talk about KDE4.0 and now KDE4.1, I was kinda tempted to give it a try (I know am late in doing this !!).

So I finally installed KDE4.1 on my Ubuntu Gutsy installation. I am no good at analyzing or commenting on piece of software, however, here goes my first impression...look and feel-wise...

• Too large Icons: The icons on the desktop are too huge by default (Or is it only my particular setting I do not know) !! The desktop looked all cluttered and not a least bit appealing...and visual appeal is the first thing you would look for.. I was rather disappointed !
  

• O2: In this default theme, the icons besides being larger, also have a shadow of sorts which makes the desktop look really ugly. You right click on the file, the terminology of the menu list options is quite different. Normally, you would have options pertaining to the file, ie, file related operations. However, the list here is : Icon settings, desktop configuration, alignment, add or remove widget, etc. Not sure if it is the same in earlier KDE versions.

Not that the above are not configurable..like with all other things, these also are! This was just my first impression :-) Frankly, I somehow do not feel encouraged to spend the time and configure the entire desktop.

So what did I like thus far ? Hmm...can't think of anything...maybe I am missing something ?!?!

Nevertheless, there is no denying that some of the best apps are available on KDE! Just that I use them on gnome desktop..like soooo many others!

Post publish edits: I must admit that I have not read all the facts on KDE4. varun just informed me that one of the idea is to have no icons on the desktop! But since I already had lots of stuff lying on my desktop, I probably saw the undesirable result. So, I think the right thing to do here is to read the facts first and go back and do the settings...

Taboo

I came across this nice add-on for firefox when causally browsing through the firefox add-on library. This add-on lets you mark a page that you want to read later by click of a button. And when you want to get to it, you again just press a button in the toolbar. This add-on is extremely useful for me as I normally am in the habit of keeping stuff for reading later (which isn't a good habit at all I know). I have been using session saver to achieve this for me all this while. The result was that at one point, I would have about 20-30 tabs open..resulting in poor firefox startup performance. And I would ultimately simply close the unread tabs without second thought! Used to bookmark several pages, but in the interest of keeping the bookmarks organized, I used to spend a few minutes to figure out where the page belonged !

With taboo, this is so much simpler and faster now ! I am yet to explore more of its functionalities though. For more information, check here

Linux Scheduler

Currently looking at the realtime Linux scheduler code...oh man! it has changed quite a bit from the last time I had seen it. For realtime tasks, the logic behind pushing and pulling of tasks looks pretty impressive..the cpu priority management by Gregory Haskins is nice, but overall, rt task load balancing is not yet scalable...it is O(n). So as the number of processors increase, the latencies in scheduling a particular rt task would increase linearly...but this is a cool piece of code to work with ;-) Having fun!!