2,881 miles

That's how many miles of road Google says lie between my house and my new dorm. Tomorrow my dad and I will slowly start eating away at those.

Orientation starts in a bit over a week. First round of quals is in less than two weeks. Egads.

It's amazing how much of your life can fit inside a relatively small car...

kde 4.1

Well, I figured I might as well try out the newest KDE version. I'm not a KDE user, on my laptop I use XFCE and on my desktop I use GNOME + Compiz Fusion.


I tested it on my laptop (running Fedora 10). I just did yum groupinstall kde-desktop and then logged out of my xfce session and logged into XFCE.

First impressions:

• Aesthetically, it's not bad, though I don't like the window decorations and the widget styles and stuff. I tried changing them but none of the defaults really suited me. Getting rid of the ugly title stripes makes it look a lot better. The panels and plasmoids are pretty good looking though.
  
• The bottom panel is too big, imo. I tried resizing it, but it crashed, taking down nm-applet and my wireless with it. Oops.
  
• Kopete may have more features than Pidgin, but I don't like the way it looks/behaves. Lots of cool default plugins though, and it looks like it has video support?
  
• Konqueror is an ok browser, though I like my Firefox + Vimperator.
  
• krunner (alt-f2) is really nice, much better than the xfce and gnome run dialogs.
  
• I don't like the way the main menu is set up, though the searchbar is nice.
  
• The system settings is ok, kind of like the XFCE system settings but prettier. It's a lot like the Mac OS X dialog.
  
• 2d stuff is ... SLOW. Also I can't figure out how to enable compositing even though I know my card supports it (and compositing works without a hitch in GNOME and XFCE4).
  
• Dolphin seems ok, though I think I like nautilus better. The single-click to open default is very annoying. Split view is nice.
  
• I used to be an Amarok user before switching to Exaile. Amarok 2 looks nice and has a lot of potential... but it's still missing most of the features that made Amarok 1.4 great.
  
• Overall, I think KDE 4 is still very much a work in progress... it's usable, but it's not comfortable... and I don't think it's just that I'm not used to it.