Yesterday I wrote about switching my work laptop to KDE. After playing around a bit with the Kontrol Center, I’ve got it mostly looking and feeling like how I want. I’ll blog about that in the next article. For this article, I want to just reminisce about Evolution and Gnome and how I miss them. A picture is worth at least a couple of words, so have a look:
Now, my home laptop is for my Gentoo work, so it is still gnome-based. However, I’ve started the memo and tasks functionality here, so it seems like it’s only a small matter of time before things flake out here. Apparently, there’s an extension to t-bird somewhere that adds calendaring, so that may be a future option. However, that’s a completely non-integrated solution so it’s at the bottom of my list.
Some people may ask me why I don’t just use Google’s Calendar (I’ve definitely gotten suggestions to do so in the past). Thanks, but I barely use GMail for any of my personal email. I’m not about to give Google (a search engine, for eff’s sake) complete access to all my life’s goings-on. Besides, I have a desktop for a reason — I want to use the damned thing. Not everything happens in my web browser. Not everything should, either, I don’t think. If, someday, that becomes a short-sighted statement and the entirety of my computer experience is web-based, I’ll take that statement back (and I expect full integration). For now, it stands.
Tomorrow, I’ll go into some annoyances about KDE in general: font sizes in GTK apps (like firefox), icon sizes on the desKtop and the lack of clickability on URLs in Kterminal or whatever that thing is called.
Meanwhile, if anyone out there has a solution for me to make KDE’s panel klock applet integrate better with kontact, that’d be kool.
Re: konsole woes.
First, for reference, I run Xfce, but my top four apps in terms of usage are konqueror, kmail, amarok, and the Xfce terminal.
I know it’s not quite what you were looking for, but the Xfce Terminal is pretty much my ideal for terminal emulators. I used konsole for a long time. Terminal does pretty much everything konsole does (no saved sessions, though) and supports clickability on URLs. It uses gnome’s vte, which gnome-terminal also uses, iirc.
>Tomorrow, I’ll go into some annoyances about KDE in general: font sizes in GTK apps (like firefox),
The problem is that Gnome uses (wrongly) a fixed dpi value (as Windows does).
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde&m=115962144902625&w=2
>icon sizes on the desKtop and the lack of
control center -> appearance -> symbols
>clickability on URLs in Kterminal or whatever that thing is called.
emerge klipper – and try to become used to its action system
>A picture is worth >at least a couple of >words, so have a look
Well, the “ideal” analog of what you are looking for would be this thing:
http://pim.kde.org/akonadi/
The catch is – it is yet to be finished :). As I understand it is going to be a part of upcoming kde-4.
Meanwhile you may take a look at superkaramba or may be some unofficial kicker (that’s how the panel is called) applets. Sorry, cannot be more specific here, as I do not use those much, but chances are there is something similar to what you are looking for.
Technically, clock is just “another applet”, so it can be removed from the panel and replaced with something else (or even simply removed).
George