POSTS
gnome programs and gnome so far
By astrophoenix
I’ve been looking for some programs to restore functionality I lost when I left kde 3.5.
glipper is an ok clipboard history application. although each entry only gets 99 characters.
liferea is almost as good an RSS Reader as akregator-kde3 (and MUCH better than akregator-kde4).
evolution is a mixed bag. it’s great for contacts, calendars, and imap, but LDAP won’t work, so no corporate address book, which is going to be a problem. I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with that yet, but I suspect I’ll end up using thunderbird and evolution simultaneously (after disabling thunderbird’s calendar completely)
one thing that has been nice about being in gnome is firefox! it’s nice to click on a link in an email again and having it open, instead of having to copy it from thunderbird and paste it in konqueror. plus when I want to use google maps, well, I already have firefox open instead of having to open firefox first.
another nice thing in gnome: the desktop in general is snappy and responsive. kde4 feels slushy by comparison (at least on my hardware). I can’t really compare to kde 3.5 any more, I’ve been running kde4 too long. but gnome feels more responsive than kde4.
so the experiment continues. Things I still need to investigate:
A way to add feeds to liferea from firefox like I used to be able to do with konqueror and akregator. (this is really a pretty minor, rare requirement, but it was one of the things that irked me about kde4 when it mysteriously went missing, both with ‘updated from 3.5’ configs, and with fresh empty configs)
random wallpaper applet so the background changes periodically from my huge pool of pictures
photo app for doing red-eye correction and possibly photo managing, to replace digikam
ldap lookups in evolution is still a sore spot.
my desktop at work has an additional problem; a couple keyboard mappings i put in don’t work, and I’m not sure why yet.
the strangest thing about gnome are the notifications. the new email and calendar alarms are perfect. they look similar to the ones from outlook (but better) but don’t interrupt your typing; so you see them, but you can keep typing on what you were doing with no interruption. that part is good. the bad part is the notifications from pidgin are too subtle; just a flashing icon on the panel, no pop-up like from evolution, so it’s easy to not even see it. there may be some options though, I haven’t looked yet.