Two Weeks
It’s been two weeks, right? And some change, since I first installed gentoo as my main desktop os.
Things are going well so far, with a few complaints:
Technobabble follows
XMMS randomly crashes, but only when I ignore it for long periods of time. Rhythmbox is bailing out on more mp3’s since the recovery, probably on corrupted ones, I’ll have to figure out which they are and work with it, but I got debug symbols compiled in and posted the crasher bug with stack traces on bugs.gnome.org.
Browsing in firefox on linux is pretty much exactly the same as firefox on windows, except that some flash applets don’t have working sound. Which is fine, because I don’t really want them to, I could definitely stand to lead the rest of my life without another badly authored noisy flash ad.
IRC is still a bit annoying, but I’ve gotten xchat2 to largely emulate what I was doing before in mirc … though I’d still prefer to have a popup prompt for ban reasons, and maybe a little more explicit “perform” than just a nickserv password dialogue. And color support in topics, too… but that’s it’s own kettle of fish.
I’m compiling openoffice.org 2.0 right now. 1.1 works quite nicely, so I quickpkg’ed it. 2.0 spooled out to 5.4 gigs for the build directory with CFLAGS including “-g”, and FEATURES including “nostrip”. So I had to scrap the compile and try again. We’ll see how it goes in a couple hours … it’s freaking huge…
I love gkrellm2. I’ve got forecasting, I’ve got monitoring, I’ve got email checking, I’ve got date and time all right there, in a comfortable and prominent but unintrusive place.
I also love xfce4. It gives me all the joys of kde apps without all the bloat. It also gives me most of the joy of gnome apps (all but apps that invoke and skin nautilus, that is). Other than accidentally launching nautilus-running gnomeapps, it’s been pretty kind to me. Liferea is definitely a suitable RSS reader replacement, and is in fact better than sharpreader and feedreader, upon inspection (it does the same things, with less memory usage, and has an “unread only” category defined by default, also lets you do smart filtering).
I think the nice thing about this was that better than half of the apps I was using before on a consistent basis were FOSS to begin with … gaim, azureus, and firefox being three of them. But, of course, there are some things missing…
For one, I really miss mirc. I wish I could find another irc client that’s anywhere near what mirc is. The closest I’ve come are ksirc and xchat, and ksirc doesn’t seem to have event filtering (killing it if I’m going to be in a channel with more than 50 people), and xchat doesn’t have a few nice amenities that I miss (tiled/cascaded subwindows, for one, a good popup system for another, a built-in object/language interface for a third).
Another one I find myself sort of wishing for is the ease of use of Explorer. Things like renaming large batches of files with inconsistent naming schemes are easier in explorer than on the commandline or in xffm. And the whole drag-and-drop paradigm is sort of half-broken in xfce, and similarly half-broken in gnome and kde. Xffm works ok, but it’s not quite the consistency, speed and smoothness of explorer in xpsp2.
Overall I think I’m adapting pretty well. I’m so used to being able to fire up a terminal and go that it’s nice to actually be able to do so without fishing for the “putty” icon and picking a server. I think I can definitely live with being here, on the whole. Despite some niggling negatives, and some software that just doesn’t feel “finished”, this has largely been a positive experience so far.