Day: May 3, 2013

KDE under Mint

Still sitting up in the ER with my wife. She's sleeping and I've nothing else to do, so here goes, a post about my ongoing Mint experience that I mostly banged out yesterday:


I've got KDE running under Mint, behaving mostly the way I like my desktop to. There are a lot of fiddly little things that just don't work quite right for some reason -- Alt-Tab works, but Alt-Shift-Tab doesn't; the taskbar is just slightly too big and I can't drag icons to reorder them even though it's explicitly set to manual order; the themes are all slightly off from what I'm used to (Oxygen is too bright and Oxygen Cold is too dark); and I'm typing this in gedit because Kate won't let me type in documents where the lines go above a certain number of characters. I'm sure all these problems are fixable -- and hey, maybe if I'd just installed Mint KDE from scratch instead of starting with Cinnamon and then adding KDE, I wouldn't have had them in the first place --, but it sure has been a fiddly pain in the ass.

In short, despite the problems I've had with it, I'm inclined to believe the hype that OpenSUSE really is the best KDE-based Linux distribution.

So for now I'm keeping it installed, running updates from a chrooted YAST every day, and hoping one of them will eventually fix the damn thing.

Another Bad Day

Wife's back in the ER. I'm sure she'll be fine but don't expect any other posts tonight.

I do have one I wrote yesterday that I might put up if I find myself with some downtime while sitting in the hospital. But don't count on it.