KDE

Looking at you, KDE/Plasma

/ from outside / , , ,

The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Au contraire, baby! Is software supposed to be like an old Dodge Dart, that rusts just sitting in the garage? Is software like a teddy bear that’s kind of gross if it’s not made out of all new material?

Source: Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software

Joel’s post is almost 25 years old. Sonos learned this lesson this year cos their management was too stupid to realize what they were doing. Also, some people in the comments are wondering why CEO asked Lead Counsel to investigate the debacle.

That’s called fiduciary duty. CEO knows he fucked up hard enough by ignoring the growing issues that any number of shareholders could have sued the company and/or its officials (in a personal capacity), and those shareholders would have had a great shot at winning said suit.

Now if only FOSS developers would learn the lesson too.

No, it did not work.

/ local / , , ,

In short, KDE 4 is about one thing and one thing only: 3D rendered eye candy. If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get, in spades. But as a desktop, as a single, integrated, holistic sense of place and set of potentialities and operations that are intuitive, minimal, and streamlined and that support productivity, KDE 4 is an epic fail in a way that makes KDE 3 roll in its grave.

via KDE4: It hurt, but did it work? | Linux Journal.

That specific comment states the plain truth about KDE4. I tried to run it on my trusty Thinkpad T60 for a few days, finding out it is basically unusable with compositing turned off. Turning it on makes it work too much for too little return; I couldn’t even listen to music on Grooveshark without the music slowing down!

Set Qt mouse pointer inside GNOME

/ local / , , , , , ,

You don’t have to install theme packages, engines or extra apps. All you need is already on your Debian system:

# update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme There are 2 choices for the alternative x-cursor-theme (providing /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme).

Selection    Path                             Priority  Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0     /usr/share/icons/DMZ-White/cursor.theme   90    auto mode
  1     /usr/share/icons/DMZ-Black/cursor.theme   30    manual mode
  2     /usr/share/icons/DMZ-White/cursor.theme   90    manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 1 update-alternatives: using /usr/share/icons/DMZ-Black/cursor.theme to provide /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme (x-cursor-theme) in manual mode.

If you’re not using Debian, it seems the way to go is to follow /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme with the following:

[Icon Theme]
Inherits=DMZ-Black

Either method sets the cursor theme systemwide through Xorg itself. To set it for a single user, add the following to ~/.Xdefaults:

Xcursor.theme: DMZ-Black
Xcursor.size: SIZE #optional

In my own case, I was using the the DMZ-Black theme on GTK applications, but Qt3/Qt4 applications (Amarok 1.4, Clementine, Skype, KeepassX) had the mouse pointer switch to DMZ-White when it entered their windows. Nothing that would cause trouble, but annoying if you want a consistent look across your environment.

As said before, this avoids unnecesary cruft on your system and works for all desktop environments you might have on your system.

Tips grabbed from here.

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