OS X, Fedora 10, KDE 4.1.2, XFCE

Still playing around with the new Macbook and OS X 10.5.6, getting used to the odd Mac key and the associated keyboard shortcuts.

Overall I'm quite impressed at the speed and slickness of the basic OS, as much as I try to avoid being impressed with eye-candy. The lack of "focus follows mouse" is a major pain, and copy/paste seems broken or tricky between X11 and non-X11 apps. The Terminal program is OK, less fancy than I was expecting based on word-of-mouth, although nicer than the lowest-common-denominator of the basic X11 xterm.

I was going to say the OS X Terminal is less capable than the KDE Konsole, but then I was rudely reminded last week that the KDE4 Konsole is less capable, and less configurable, than the KDE3 Konsole. Currently I'd say the OS X Terminal and KDE4's Konsole appear pretty comparable in capability and available configuration options at present.

I've complained before about KDE4 on Fedora 9, but had noted some progress and had hoped the version Fedora 10 shipped with would be further improved. Last week I upgraded my work back-up machine to Fedora 10, largely as a test, and experienced many of the same problems...

The Konsole no longer has a login shell "--ls" command line option. Transparency is still not available. Add an application laucher to the Plasma-based panel and dare to change the "Icon Settings" and its icon will be replaced with a question mark. Worse still, the changes you've made to the panel launcher have been propagated back to the main KDE menu, so don't make a mistake! As for trying to move icons around on the panel... it didn't appear to be possible at all (no right click, "Move" option anymore) and its seems other are as confused by this as I am, although here is the non-intuitive way to do it.

And its slowwwww. The price we pay for KDE trying to implement desktop graphical effects similar to OSX, I suppose.

Any, sick of the fuss, I ditched KDE4 on the Fedora 10 machine and switched to XFCE, and managed to quickly configure my desktop into looking something like KDE3.5 with nicely transparent terminals in less time that it took me to get the KDE4 Konsole to use a login shell.

One step forward and one step backwards, I suppose... Ah well.