A lot of people at the moment are immensely intrigued by Google Chrome OS. I won’t hide that I am one of them. Google promises a much needed shift in the way small computers work. Problems like software updates, backups, installation, maintenance, viruses, have plagued the world for too long: a shift is way overdue. To me, however, the change about to happen shows us what many people have refused to believe for a long time: KDE and GNOME shot each other dead. I write this knowing full well that I am going to make a lot of people angry. This might be the first time a writer receives very angry responses from both camps — KDE and GNOME’s users might actually (finally?) join arms and fight just to show everybody how wrong I am!

There are a number of simple games I like to play when waiting for a package to download or compile. Often the available themes don’t really suit me, and in any case I like to make themes or skins when I can. One of the easier packages to create an alternate theme for is KDE Mahjongg (kmahjongg), which I will demonstrate here using Inkscape and Gimp. With the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing coming up, a space exploration theme seems appropriate.

A long time ago I gave my retired father a computer. Having previously given my mother a computer with Windows 98 on and not being a success for my father I planned things differently and achieved a quite different result.

I wrote my story and ideas down in various places, giving a talk at my local LUG and even getting a short paper published in the British Human Computer Interactions Group “Interface” magazine.

Next month I’ll be giving a revised and extended version of the LUG talk to the UKUUG Linux’08 meeting in Manchester.

I don’t like KDE4. I don’t like the Dolphin file manager either. There, I said it. I’m not trying to start a flame war. Really. But those dislikes are proportional to my concern about the future of Konqueror. For my money, it is just about one of the best things before and since sliced bread. I loved it enough to write about here at length and in depth. As a file manager it is packed to the gunnels with power features and as a browser it’s not half bad either. The integration of both in this universal document viewer is the killer feature but it is getting rather left behind behind in the Web 2.0 goldrush. I worry that it might wither on the vine. Then, I discovered Krusader. It’s a massively powerful and feature-packed twin panel file manager and if Dolphin isn’t cutting the mustard Krusader might just be what you’ve been looking for.

As we follow the zig-zaggy quest of me trying to learn to program, I discover the next significant step, “Interest”. I started with a goal: to learn to program. Next I came up with a plan: Learn Python by writing a program called PT (period tracker) but I lacked the last bit, interest.

You see, there was very little that period tracker did that a calendar didn’t. Spending hours to make a program to do work that I could do in five minutes with a calendar and a pencil seemed like a waste of effort.

Ever since I first fired up KDE on openSuSE, I’ve been in love. The KDE interface just swept me off my feet. But there’s always been one nagging thing. Firefox and Thunderbird stick out like two sore thumbs. They don’t look like KDE apps (see figure 1 and figure 4), they don’t work with KDE programs (like KPrinter), and they just don’t feel like they belong in KDE. Luckily, since both of these apps have support for add-ons, it is easy to remedy this.

One of the biggest navigational issues with any operating system is using program menus. Windows users have to open the Start Menu, scan for the program, realize that the program is probably in the subfolder under the programmer’s name, scan the appropriate subfolder, and then click on the program’s icon. Macintosh users must open Finder, find and click on the Applications folder, and then search for the program’s name. GNOME and KDE users have an advantage: they have categories in their respective Applications and K menus.

Last month I wrote a piece saying that I was going to try KDE for a month (I’m a big GNOME fan!) and then report back on my experiences. I must admit I’m feeling relieved to be back with GNOME as I never really felt comfortable with KDE, but that’s not to say it was all bad.

It appears this old argument is flaring up again. On Linux.com there was an article discussing some recent posts on the Linux Foundation’s Desktop Architects mailing list: Christian Schaller suggested Linus Torvalds should try using Gnome for a month and then report back on his experiences at the forthcoming GAUDEC conference in the UK. Inspired by this I’ve decided to take up the challenge – all be it in the opposite direction (and I won’t be reporting back at GAUDEC!).

KDE will soon be releasing version 4.0 of its desktop environment. But KDE has a deep, dark secret – it engages in slavery. Actually it’s not a secret, they tell you straight up, they use slaves throughout its infrastructure. And since February is Black History Month in the U.S., I feel compelled to speak out against this injustice. Slavery anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere, even in software.