The Real Reason I Can't Bring Myself to Switch to KDE

I have tried KDE now, three times. And I've actually managed to get some great eye-candy out of it...In fact, in terms of looks, I do ADORE KDE. Some examples of what I've done with it in the past:

From Screenshots

From Screenshots

However, there's one little thing that means I can never quite stick with it! You might be forgiven for thinking it was one of the following:

• It is too resource-heavy compared to Gnome
• It annoys me slightly that the panel never matches the windows
• The zoom out feature is still a bit buggy
• The customisation settings, while more extensive than stock Gnome, are more difficult to get a grip of
• That damn KDE wallet asks me for my password every time I come back from suspend

...and so on and so forth. But in the end, all of these things are just little niggles, things that you would get over in time, just by using the desktop environment, and getting to know it better.

So what is it, then, you ask? Don't laugh...

Native KDE applications all have ridiculous names!!!

They all appear to be contrived to contain a "K" in some way, like when high school kids decide that it's not "wicked", it's "wikid". Or they just get lazy, and stick a "K" on the front of a literal name describing exactly what the application does. All you have to do is take a look at KDE's website to see what I mean:


So let's examine the evidence, and compare some Gnome and KDE default applications:

• Web browsers: Firefox vs. Konqueror
  I suppose Konqueror is more than just a web browser, so maybe that's what they were going for with the whole "conqueror" epithet, but it doesn't excuse the "K". It's up there with "Hed Kandi", "Krazy Glue" and "Krazy Kamp" (the musical my middle school put on in the 7th grade).
• Mail Clients: Evolution vs. KMail
  The lack of imagination here is just staggering. Could we not come up with a better name than "KMail" for a mail client in KDE?
• BitTorrent Clients: Transmission vs. KTorrent
  See above. Come on, guys, let's have a little naming creativity here!
• Music players: Rhythmbox vs. amaroK, now Amarok
  This one is arguably the weakest example, since the name actually means something in another language ("wolf" in Inuktitut), so the "K" is a transliteration anyway. Also, the dev team get points for seeing the light and fixing the capitalisation issue, which is what landed it on my list in the first place.
• Feed readers: n/a vs. Akregator
  In fairness, this isn't quite an even comparison because Gnome doesn't ship with a default feed reader. But "Akregator"?! Come on, it's "aggregator", so at the very least, it should be "Akkregator" or something...Basically, there's no excuse for this one...

Now, I can't be completely one-sided here, as Gnome has its fair share of awkwardly-named applications, like gedit, but it's nowhere near the volume that KDE has.

What it all comes down to is that I get embarrassed telling people that I use applications with such ridiculous names. All the major OSes, including Windows and MacOS, put a lot of thought into the names of their applications, and I wish KDE would do the same. If they could crack that, they'd pretty much have a convert!

How to make Conky play nicely with KDE 4.3

Up till recently, I stuck fervently to Gnome DE, since it was the default on Ubuntu 8.10. After I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04, I decided to give Kubuntu a whirl (the current version of Kubuntu is KDE 4.2), but I could barely get it to run for an hour without a total system freeze, so I ditched that idea!

When KDE 4.3 came out, I was willing to give it another try, especially as a number of folks on the August Screenie Thread at the Ubuntu Forums said that it was much faster and better all around than 4.2...Well, they didn't let me down! However, this is not an I LOVE KDE thread...

Since I depend heavily on Conky to keep my system running, I needed KDE and Conky to play nicely together or I wouldn't be able to use it full-time. Since I already used a startup script to run Conky, I just let that run in KDE and, uh, got this:

From My Little Desktop Photos

After a bit of investigation (thank you, Internet), I discovered that the reason was twofold: first, Conky uses pseudo-transparency instead of ACTUAL transparency; second, KDE doesn't draw wallpaper to the root window, only to the plasma desktop. To clarify these points:
1) Pseudo-transparency in Conky means that it peeks at the root desktop and draws it as the background of the Conky window.
2) KDE draws wallpapers to the plasma desktop only, which is the lowest window on top of the root window. Instead, the root window is empty, which shows up in Conky as black. Yuck. Well, unless you really like black.

Anyway, after much tinkering, I have gotten my desktop to look like this:

From My Little Desktop Photos

Yay!

To get your Conky and KDE to cooperate, rather than pugilate (is that a word?):

Use feh to draw the current background to the root window.

Feh is a lightweight image viewer, but that's really irrelevant, since it does what we need it to here! To install it (if you haven't already), use:

sudo apt-get install feh

I will assume for the moment that you are already using a startup script to launch your Conky from the startup programs menu...Mine initially looked like this:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 15
conky &

I wanted to run feh just once before Conky started up, so that the root window was already drawn before Conky tried to peek at it, so I modified my conky_start.sh to be:

#! /bin/bash
feh --bg-scale `grep 'wallpaper=' ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc | tail --bytes=+11`
sleep 15
conky -&

A couple of notes...The "--bg-scale" option assumes that you use "scale" to draw your wallpaper (as opposed to center, tile, etc.). If you do use another method, you can also use --bg-tile --bg-center, etc. instead. The feh looks at the plasma-desktop-appletsrc file to see what wallpaper is currently being used, and draws that to the background.

And as with all tweaks, there are a couple of pitfalls. First, because we're running feh just once before Conky starts, if you change backgrounds during your session, it won't change in Conky, a la this:

From My Little Desktop Photos

I would recommend doing a

killall conky
~/scripts/conky_start.sh

and restarting the plasma-desktop to redraw your Conky (I just log out and back in).

Another pitfall is that if you use the stock KDE wallpapers, this method may not work. That's because the "wallpaper=" field in plasma-desktop-appletsrc in this case points to a directory, not a file, and somehow KDE figures out which of several resolutions to use. Feh can't figure that out, so it draws nothing, and you're back to the black background. The workaround is to find the wallpaper you want, copy it into, say ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/ and select it from there with the Desktop Settings dialog.

Ensure that your Conky window doesn't overlap any plasmoids.

Regardless of whether you use own_window_hints below (see my previous post), plasmoids will always draw still lower. So if your Conky window overlaps, you'll get something like this:

From My Little Desktop Photos

(Keep in mind that I use Compiz to make my Conky semi-transparent, as in another previous post...)

Enjoy KDE!!!

Well, that's pretty self-explanatory...!