FOB

I switched my home desktop from KDE to Gnome today. I guess I should have done it many months ago, but it took me this long to reach the necessary pain threshold. I had been a KDE user for many years. (Prior to that I was a twm user, which should give you some idea.) Thus, I had set up a bit of infrastructure around KDE and gotten used to working with it. This switch was a big deal to me, and not in a good way…

However, as you may know, the recent KDE 4 release series has been plagued by misfeatures, regressions and bugs. I put off moving from KDE 3, with which I was perfectly happy, as long as possible. Finally, however, Debian pushed KDE 4.2 out as a replacement with no chance to continue using KDE 3 in unstable or testing. Usually with Debian this signifies that software is ready for use, so I switched over.

Unfortunately, substantial problems with KDE 4.2 finally made me give up on it. The upgrade path from KDE 3 was a nightmare; I ended up writing a custom shell script for converting .desktop files, for example. Nothing worked out of the box, and when I did get stuff working it had substantial issues. I had to turn off the KDE 4 "eye candy", as my Intel graphics drivers seemed to not deal with it well. However, I'm still not sure how much that was the fault of the KDE 4 compositor.

That was the constant theme of KDE 4. Things that used to work fine in KDE quit working right, and I couldn't easily diagnose the problem to even file a decent bug report. For example, on my box logging out of KDE 4 would inevitably crash kdm or something and cause the X server to restart. Was this the fault of KDE, of kdm, of X? Who knows?

The final straw, though, was apparently some kind of KDE bug. Whenever I exited the last iceweasel window via its close menu item, iceweasel would shut down normally. But if I exited via the window manager close box, it would leave a phantom instance of iceweasel running—which would prevent opening a new iceweasel until it was killed from the command line. It could have been a window manager bug, but things work fine for me now running the same firefox under gnome with kwin as my windown manager. What's up? Who knows?

So I've burned a couple of hours setting up gnome a bit. I've killed some of the more egregious running services, added some application icons in the taskbar. I've installed a gnome-terminal-launcher app for easy remote shell access at the suggestion of Josh Triplett. (Why hasn't someone Deb repo'ed gnome-terminal-launcher? It's GPL, and there's a working .deb package in Ubuntu, which is what I'm using.) I've switched to kwin as my window manager, since it supports the twm/BII titlebar style, which I have grown fond of over the years since I watched Keith Packard build it into twm.

I'm really disappointed with Debian's decision to not allow KDE 3 to coexist with KDE 4 for a while. I'm also obviously really disappointed with KDE 4, which IMHO represents a huge step backward overall. I'm impressed with kwin's ability to work seamlessly as a gnome window manager. Finally, I'm impressed with the improvements in gnome. After many years of avoiding it, I'm ready to be there again.

Linus, you were right. I should never have tried to keep going with KDE in the first place. Maybe I'll switch back someday. Doesn't look like it will be any time soon, though.