KDE

No, it did not work.

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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!

No, it did not work. Read More »

“One of the biggest arguments the Linux community has brought up for migration from Linux was diversity, but right now, Linux implementors are competely ignoring this plea of their own. Instead, they come up with, well, ”proprietary“ Open Source software which locks people to use Linux and Gnome/KDE.”

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The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

“One of the biggest arguments the Linux community has brought up for migration from Linux was diversity, but right now, Linux implementors are competely ignoring this plea of their own. Instead, they come up with, well, ”proprietary“ Open Source software which locks people to use Linux and Gnome/KDE.” Read More »

Set Qt mouse pointer inside GNOME

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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.

Set Qt mouse pointer inside GNOME Read More »