A Mind Lost

… hello Idunnoyet.

For Christmas I gave my elder son ol’ faithful, a dual-core Athlon64 X2 4200+.  Equipped with 2GB of DDR2, an EVGA GeForce 8800GTS, and a lone 250GB SATA hard drive, it is hardly a powerhouse but was more than suitable for playing with Linux (Kubuntu, as previously mentioned).

My son’s old hand-me-down from his grandad, an AthlonXP 2200+ with 512MB and a GeForce3 is far too old to play any of the latest PC games that have caught my son’s eye; specifically StarCraft 2 and the upcoming Diablo 3.

Anyway, wipe and install and he’s got XP SP3 flying on it and seems quite happy.  I plan on swapping the 8800GTS for a 250GTS I’ve got kicking around after upgrading my main machine to a 460GTX for Christmas (paired with a 24″ LED backlit Samsung display… sweet sweet 1920×1080 goodness).  I also got him his coveted StarCraft 2 for Christmas, which he’s been thoroughly enjoying.  Hasn’t beat me in 1v1, yet.  The boy needs to learn to hotkey.

But I digress…

This has left me with the AthlonXP  to play with.  Digging around I found some more memory for it that I didn’t even know I had, bringing it up to a gigabyte.  It’s not matched, not even from the same manufacturer, but given how dog-slow this thing already is I’ll take any performance hit for an extra half-gig of RAM.

At first I threw Kubuntu on it, but it didn’t take long to realize that it’s just too much of a strain for the poor thing – everything felt sluggish.  I decided this was the perfect opportunity to give one of the roll-your-own distros a try.  Initially I was going to go with Linux from Scratch, but after a stroll through their docs I was reminded just how time-consuming it is.  Instead I grabbed the latest Gentoo .iso to gave that a spin.

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… hello Kubuntu.

I really wanted to love plain old Ubuntu, but I just do not like Gnome. It looks pretty enough, but there’s too many small things “wrong” that I just don’t find using it a pleasant experience.

First, the two panels, top and bottom.  I know they can be changed, moved and even removed, but the whole idea just smacks of dumb to me, and sets the stage for everything else.

I don’t like the menu layout, the configuration options are limited, and the whole “Applications Places System” setup is annoying. A single menu button with an icon and optional text is what I grew up with, and it’s what I want.

Coming from Slackware, I’m also more familiar with KDE, both in appearance and operation.  I also tend to use more Qt-based apps than GTK (aside from the staples like The Gimp, Pidgin and Firefox). Krusader is my preferred file manager. Yakuake is a nifty drop-down terminal in the style of the Quake console (and better/less buggy than its GTK cousin, Tilda). Amarok’s an okay player, but I prefer the minimalist approach of Audacious (although I prefer foobar2000 over anything else).

Finally, the buttons to minimize, maximize and close a window are in the right places, without having to change any configuration settings.  I don’t know what the Ubuntu devs were thinking when they decided to move them, but let’s just say my opinion of them for that change is not flattering at all.

… kinda.

I still love you, Slackware, but I’m getting old, and as I get older, I get lazier (if that were possible).  I love your beautiful simplicity.  I understand you.  I know where you keep your configuration files, I grok your init system, and in general I know where to go to fix a problem when you’re misbehaving.  I’ve always preferred KDE over Gnome (although I whole-heartedly appreciate the effort that goes into both of them).

But trying to install software for which there is no pre-packaged version readily available, and (more importantly) for which there are no pre-packaged dependencies, is a real pain in the butt.  I’m lazy, I don’t want to spend hours poking around building (and oft-times, rebuilding, and rebuilding again) a dozen libraries before getting to the program I was after in the first place.

So for the time being you will live on in my heart, and in my virtual machines.  My old box is getting a fresh coat of pain in the form of Ubuntu.  I’ve played with it before, but I’m hoping things will go better this time around (two major releases later).  Someday, in some faraway time, I may even be able to shed my dependence on Windows and move entirely to free software.