I switched my desktop over to Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon yesterday. Previously, I was running Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn. Gutsy’s final release is in October and I always get antsy whenever the release dates get close, usually breaking down and installing the beta releases when they come out. This time however, I gave in a bit earlier than usual. Gutsy goes beta in a little less than a month, but I decided to go for it anyway, since I can alway reinstall the older OS version and I also have a laptop for backup if things are problematic, but I want to stick it out and play with things. So, I’m currently running Kubuntu 7.10, Tribe 5 and things are moving pretty smoothly. I see some things are missing or unfinished, but I’ve got a stable and functional desktop and I’m able to do just about everything I need or want. I’m sticking with it.

Another thing I’ve done is switched back over to KDE from Gnome, mainly just to see what’s new. I’m well familiar with KDE, so it’s a smooth transition. I do notice some annoying font issues, but I can probably fix that and though I’ve checked it a few times already, my resolution seems off. I could have sworn my windows weren’t so huge with Gnome. I vaguely recall this being something I had to fix in KDE before, way back when. I have a flat screen monitor on this desktop, so there’s only one resolution and I’ve amended my xorg.conf to retain only the correct one…yet something looks off. I’ll figure it out at some point, I guess. Perhaps it will fix itself by the beta or final release.

One thing I notice with 7.10 is that Kopete, the KDE instant messaging client now comes with built-in OTR encryption support as well as the GnuPG it was using before. I’m loving this, since most other clients out there like Gaim/Pidgin and Adium as well as others, are equipped with OTR. I’d previously switched over to Gaim since I couldn’t encrypt messaging between my friends with Kopete because none of them had GnuPG capable clients.

Anyway, I have a new desktop to play with. Maybe at some point in the near future I’ll put Beryl on it for some eye-candy, but for now, I’m just checking things out.

I’ve been running Xubuntu Feisty Fawn on my desktop computer at home since Herd 4 (so… uh… at least a month I think…?) and I’ve found that there’s not much I can say about it that’s bad. In fact, it’s the first time I was able to upgrade via the “apt-get dist-upgrade” method without a whole mess, complete with a busted X server. I was able to do the upgrade and still have everything working, even Beryl.

Still as successful as the upgrade was, I generally prefer back shit up and to do clean install since I think that a lot of the fun of a distribution upgrade is seeing all the changes, bells and whistles as they appear fresh out of the box (or the ISO, in my case). A dist-upgrade can at times hide these things from my since it may upgrade a program but it still relies on my old config files for the most part.

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I’ve been using Kubuntu for about a year and a half, having switched over from the basic Ubuntu setup. Over that time, I’ve really come to prefer KDE over Gnome. It’s some funky shit—I dig it.

However, a few months ago, I got into Beryl and quickly became addicted to having it. My desktop is a Pentium 4 with a 128 meg Nvidia GeForce 5200 and 768 megs of RAM. As such, the addition of Beryl has made KDE programs kind of slow, clunky and prone to weirdness. My laptop hasn’t really suffered at all much as it’s much more powerful and I guess at some point I’ll slap in a new graphics card and some more RAM into my desktop, but as an experiment, I decided to try Xubuntu with its Xfce desktop environment, to see if it made any difference in performance with Beryl.

After a quick test of installing the xubuntu-desktop package onto my existing Kubuntu setup and getting promising results, I decided to clean my slate, wipe and install Xubuntu solely and see if I could survive on Xfce and Beryl, get a nice looking desktop and have everything I like about KDE, but using GTK+ alternatives. The plan was (is) to get this setup going and try it out, just on my desktop for a few months…say till the Feisty Fawn release hits and then decide, or whatever.

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I’ve decided to try and give up using Firefox for at least one week. In it’s place I plan on using Konqueror and in some cases where I’m using OSX, Safari or perhaps Camino. The real test for me though is to see if I can make Konqueror do everything I’m used to doing (and worry that I can’t live without) with Firefox.

I’ve been falling slowly out of infatuation with Firefox for a while now. Version 2.0 left me mildly underwhelmed and dealing with much of the same-old including an annoying memory leak. Since I use KDE as my desktop environment, I’ve always had Konqueror kicking around and have been very impressed with it’s abilities as a file manager. In my job, where I often have to migrate many files from server A to B, Konqueror’s view splitting features kick serious ass. As a web browser that I’ve had access to for almost two years, I’ve probably used it a handful of times, mainly because of my dependence on Firefox extensions.

This reliance on extensions bothers me. The fact that enough people use it now that exploits are starting to show up isn’t great news to me either. Granted, they’re generally addressed pretty fast, but whatever. Really cool people use fringe, obscure browsers like Konqueror or Lynx.

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So, once again out of a general boredom and desire to up my geekness to the bleeding new shit, I installed Kubuntu Edgy-Eft knot 2. Not even an alpha release. I feel risky, what can I say…I wore a condom.

Of course, my initial upgrade via source list completely fucked my system leaving me unable to boot any kernel. I seem to always have that luck whenever trying to finagle a dist-upgrade. Luckily, I’ve a habit of backing my shit up before doing risky shit like this, so I was cool. I downloaded an ISO and burned a CD on my laptop, wiped my desktop’s Linux partition and reinstalled. The disk install worked fine, booting like a live cd and giving me a little icon to click on the desktop to do an actual disk install. The new installer is fancier than ever and I was up and running in a couple glasses of wine and a nervous cigarette or two.

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On any given day, I might bounce around three different computers and use usually two to three operating systems. One thing that drives me crazy about this is managing my RSS feed subscriptions&8212;of which I have quite a few. I’ve tried various readers like Sage, Bloglines, Firefox’s live bookmarks and my personal favorite, KDE’s Akregator. It’s always the case that while one RSS feed has one necessary feature, it lacks another. So, I keep trying new aggregators. Enter Newshutch.

Right now, my biggest peeve is keeping my feeds synced with where I happen to be, so that news I’ve read on one computer with one aggregator won’t show as unread on another machine. I really hate it. As I mentioned above, I’ve played with Bloglines, which is web-based and was about to give it another try when I heard about Newshutch. In all honesty, it’s really no different from Bloglines in functionality except for some fancy Ajax action. I like the look of it and appreciate the 21st century feel Ajax brings. There’s no notifier apps/extensions to use, which is a downer and feeds update every thirty minutes. I uploaded my OPML file, importing my feed list and am willing to give it a try for a couple weeks.

Someday, someone will make the better aggregator. One that’s either web-based or synchronizable between computers, has a decent notification system where the user can tweak individual feed update schedules and delivers feeds attractively or at least lets you edit a CSS file to display them with. Someday.

Addendum
After using Newshutch for a couple hours, I’ve left it behind and am now back using Bloglines. Newshutch is too damn clunky and slow for any real usage, unfortunately.

I was checking out an article about various keyboard shortcuts with KDE and I was blown away by a feature in Konqueror. When viewing a web page in Konqueror, holding down CTRL highlights every link on the page with a letter or number that you type in and hit enter to navigate without having to use a mouse. I don’t know how long I’ve wished for something like this. I hate having to use a mouse and especially with a laptop, it’s a really big bitch.

Unfortunately, I’m addicted to the various extensions that I depend on with Firefox and I just can’t switch over to Konqueror. So, I immediately started scouring through available Firefox extensions on mozilla.org and after a good long while (Mozilla’s extension organization sucks), I finally found the equivalent. NumberFox does the exact same thing. Using only numbers to tag links, the font is a little too small and there’s no options to change anything, but it does the job. On a web page, hitting ALT-w activates NumberFox for both Windows and Linux (APPLE-e on Mac) and you’re off, leaving that mouse in the dust. I find that some links and some pages do not respond to the extension&8212;links in Flash are obviously a no-go, but I find that it works in 95% of the pages I’ve tried so far.

Liron-Freaking-Fishypants-WTF-OMFG-Tocker aka Cheeseball Deluxe in response to my post on moving to Kubuntu Dapper Beta asks:

Ever since I had been trying out all sorts of “community” versions of Mandrake/Mandriva, I’ve stopped being an early-adopter. I’ve never had any pleasant experieces with pre-release versions of operating systems, since I have a low level of tolerance and most of the stuff I use my computer for on a daily basis is “mission critical” (read: “work”). However, I’ve been looking for a reason to move away from Mandriva for a short time, as I personally don’t feel the evolution taking place. Being a simple end-user and not a programmer, if I don’t see or feel this evolution it’s a bad, bad sign. More people are moving away from Mandriva as we speak.

My question is this: Would you recommend Kubuntu over other linux os’? If so, why? Do you believe it’s more capable than other distros you have used? If so, in which ways?

I’d definitely recommend Kubuntu over other Linux-based OS—but I’d take it with a grain of salt. My experience in home use has always primarily been Debian-based OS. Since you use Mandriva, like me, you are used to having access to repositories and using apt-get and whatnot. I like it. I prefer it. I’m very inclined to stay in that sandbox.

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It’s very frustrating when I can’t get a program from my Linux distro’s repositories. Ubuntu and Kubuntu share the same repos and while there’s a huge array of applications available there, not everything makes it and I’m forced to choose between going without or slogging through compiling the application from source which is something I can do, but I’m totally uncomfortable with. Using apt-get with the correct repositories is safe, fun and leaves me slightly giddy at the sheer glut of shit I can access for free. Compiling from source, meddling with dependencies and running the risk of breaking something, while a really good feeling when all goes well, more often than not drives me up the wall. Maybe in a few more years I’ll scoff at the challenges of wrangling source tarballs, but until then, I’ll take the repos, please.

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I’m just on a role with the KDE worship. To think, a mere few days ago, I peevishly looked down on all things K. I keep finding more and more bad-ass apps and features that makes me wonder if this website is going to transform into a repository for drooling desktop worship. I’ve gotta reign the geek shit in, I know. But, since I’ve already started this post, allow me to indulge in a bit more of the antisocial software fetish.

My latest object of amorous sheep-humping enthusiasm is amaroK, a media player for KDE that comes pre-installed in Kubuntu. An all-in-one player and music library manager, amaroK is definitely the best I’ve ever used. Using MySQL to manage a database of my music collection, it fetches album covers, artist biographies from Wikipedia and discographies as well as lyrics. It does an excellent job of creating dynamic playlists by analyzing the music I listen to the most. You can’t help but be happy with the damn thing. Another plus is that amaroK works with the Last.fm service, letting me post my listening habits to my profile page as well as any other place I should choose. Case in point, notice the “Recent Music” section I’ve added to the sidebar of this page. As I listen to a song, amaroK updates Last.fm, which in turn updates this list on my website. Kinda cool.

Should I be in a statistical mood, amaroK gives me loads of summaries. What I listen to, like the best and might like. Songs are rated and scored depending not only on how often I play a song, but also how much of the track I listen to. A song I listen to in entirety gets a much higher scoring than a tune I skip after thirty seconds of play. I can also check Last.fm for even more charts and displays showing the history of self-inflicted my ear damage and the fact that I have a serious problem with Death Metal. I’m so deaf, but very happy.