A week with KDE 4.4

This past week I decided to see what all the fuss was about KDE 4.4. Everyone seems to love it, so I thought it may be time to withdraw from my tilling window manager love-fest and embrace the floating window manager lifestyle, again.

It was a mistake.

The install was painless, a

sudo pacman -Sy kde

command and a half hour later and I had all the KDE packages installed. Add

startkde

to my

xinitrc

file and I was launching into a new KDE 4.4 environment.

I played around with a couple plasmoids, but quickly realized that to do anything on the machine meant that they would be hidden, so stopped wasting time with them. Next, I had to figure out a good window/desktop management scheme to use with my dual monitors. I opted for Firefox and Thunderbird on desktop 4, coding terminals and Firefox (api docs, viewing websites I was working on, etc.) on desktop 1, and ‘random’ terminals and programs on desktop 2. Desktop 3 was used as a temporary/random application area.

I won’t bore you with the details of my week, but I had a chance to do everything from some serious “flow” programming, to server/system maintenance, to goofing off on the Internet. It was all painful.

To figure out why it was so painful was easy to spot, and it all came down to window maintenance. Maybe I’ve just used tilling window managers too much, but to have to keep alt+tabbing between windows and resizing them when wanting to see multiple programs on the screen was downright painful. To combat this I tried to run all programs full-screen, but this just made the alt+tab problem bigger.

Needless to say, I’m back to using XMonad. As soon as I switched back, I could feel myself breathe a sigh of relief …. I was back home.