KDE SC 4: The good, the bad, and the broken

[Duncan]

Billie Walsh posted on Sat, 29 May 2010 09:18:57 -0500 as excerpted:

> My better half likes to clutter up her desktop with all kinds of
> "stuff". Me, I don't want to see anything but the wallpaper. I don't
> want to see directories and files all over the place. If I want to see
> all that junk I'll open Dolphin. Otherwise, I want it out of site.

Based on what I've read as well as my own observations, the "everything
in the desktop dir/folder" approach would appear to be the most common
for "I don't want to have to understand computers, I just want to be able
to use them as I would other tools needed to do my job" type people.

> When I install and see that "Folder View" box and the other one that's
> default the very first thing I do is tell them to go away and never come
> back.

I'd guess this to be the most common for many computer literate users, with
the significant exception of the futurist gadget collectors, who prefer a
multi-instrumented dashboard type approach.  Our "fearless plasma leader"
asegio would appear to be in the latter category, given the approach taken
with plasma.

I'm somewhat in between the two computer literate types, as in, I like a
quite limited and very carefully selected few icons and gadgets (plasmoids,
in context) on my desktop, preferably with transparent or mostly transparent
backgrounds (the kde defaults are nowhere near transparent enough, but a
slight shading can help with visibility in some instances), the better to
enjoy my selected desktop wallpaper.

On my big-desktop (dual 24 inch 1920x1200 monitors stacked for 1920x2400
overall resolution), I have an always-on-top "system status" panel covering
the top third of the top (sysstatus and aux) monitor, so 1/6 of the overall
space.  Save for the systray plasmoid, it's filled with yasp-scripted
customized system monitor plasmoids.  In the bottom 2/3 of the top monitor,
I have a yawp plasmoid (transparent) top-left, a large mostly transparent
analog clock center, a vertically oriented narrow strip folderview plasmoid
left, and a couple quick-access plasmoid icons.  The bottom (main/working)
monitor has the comic-strip plasmoid top left, and a very small (7% width
or so, shorter than normal) auto-hide panel bottom-left.  I use a slightly
modified version of the professional theme off kdelook, so the panel and
plasmoid backgrounds are almost, but not totally, transparent, with a slight
(perhaps 5% opacity) white "frost" for uniform color readability and
simple-narrow-opaque-white borders on most elements, so I can actually see
where the panels and plasmoids are, and a transparent outside and
nearly-transparent-center analog clock, yielding a very surrealistic
"Dali-like" effect when superimposed on the wallpaper that I really enjoy.
Thus, the analog clock can really be seen as a dynamic aspect of the
wallpaper artwork.  Otherwise, it wouldn't be there either, as I normally
prefer a digital clock, and in fact have one running as part of one of my
yasp-scripted plasmoids.

I can afford that bit of clutter on my main desktop, because it's reasonably
large.  On my netbook, OTOH, I run only a very small auto-hide panel lower
left, so the desktop is entirely clear.  Everything else is on the dashboard,
as I've taken advantage of the (AFAIK) new ability in kde 4.4 to configure
it as an entirely separate activity.  So on the netbook, when I invoke the
dashboard, I get a full-screen sysmon activity monitor, complete with various
yasp-scripted plotters (battery status included) and tail of the syslog,
systray, etc.

BTW, neither machine has a taskbar configured.  That's unnecessary as I
use desktop-grid or alt-tab app-switching, and I don't really have room
for the visual clutter of a taskbar, even on the big-desktop main machine.

I should really post a an updated screenshot, but here's an old one, taken
when I was still running mostly kde3 (kicker, including kworldwatch and the
ksysguard kicker applet on top, and the knewsticker kicker applet scrolling
across the bottom, kaffeine and konqueror) with a bit of kde4 (konsole,
kmail as visible in the system tray) as well.  It should give you an idea
of the general layout I prefer, with the one I have today being similar.

(Image is 1920x2400 native, beware if you don't use an auto-image-resizing
browser.  Just 1.5 MB tho as it's a color-reduced-to-256-color png.)

http://members.cox.net/pu61ic.1inux.dunc4n/pix/screenshots/k35-42desk.256.png

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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