Amerika - Force of Occupation

(Caveat: This post was written while still not entirely awake. It may come across as a rambling diatribe, but the sentiment is still true.)

I'm not as cavalier as I used to be with respect to trying new releases of Linux distros, or cobbling together seemingly discordant pieces of hardware to build a functional machine as I once was. That fact alone has I'm sure led to some manner of atrophy in my "Wow, that's cool" bone.

KDE 4 is going to drive me to Gnome. I don't like Gnome at all, but KDE 4 is just awful. It seems like the developers put too much energy in to trying to make KDE 4 pretty (read: eye candy), but they've also managed to make things difficult to accomplish via the GUI. With all due respect to those who like KDE 4, it seems like things have been dumbed down to a point where most of the configurability that used to be straightforward is now difficult at best. For example, I will grant you that KNetworkManager has never been stellar. However, it has become a series of prompts followed by a "Next" button. I've always felt Gnome made things more difficult for me in its effort to be easy and friendly. Maybe KDE 4 is just such a departure from what I'm used to...no, it sucks. Not that I'm using this name drop for any kind of cred, but anyone remember when Linus Torvalds stated that he encourages “people to just switch to KDE?” Even he has gone to using Gnome.


I for one, don't really care for spiffy graphical effects. What I've seen of MS Vista left me wanting to hurl. That's one reason I've never bothered with the likes of Beryl or Compiz. Pretty is counterproductive! The Proletariat don't need "Pretty" to be great! If I want pretty, I'll download an image of some attractive brunette lady from the Internet and set it as my wallpaper. (I would like to point out that I'm one of those unimaginative dolts who set their screensaver to "blank screen.")

Bah! This whole experience makes me glad that the KDE version of Ubuntu 8.04 is a LTS release.