I haven't posted one of these in a while. I've been in an 8-bit kind of mindset for a while:

What I actually stare at for 8 hours every day:

KDE4, Buuf icons, QtCurve, wallpaper is from somewhere on the internets.

I've been avoiding KDE4 for a while. But yesterday I threw KDE4 onto my laptop, because it runs Kubuntu and I don't really care if my laptop breaks.

When I first tried installing it, I accidentally got KDE 4.0 somehow. That version was massively incomplete. After I upgraded to 4.1 it was very apparent how much more work went into KDE between the 4.0 and 4.1 release.

Regardless, looking at 4.1, I know I'm echoing what a lot of others have already said, but I agree: KDE4 is nice, but it's nowhere near KDE3 quality yet, and nowhere near complete. Some issues:

• The default theme is usable but bland. It's far better than some of the garish, loud, cartoony default themes KDE has had in past versions, at least. But it doesn't have a lot of life to it.
• Most icons are missing or broken (showing up as "?"). This is probably due to KDE being packaged improperly for Kubuntu, or something choking during my install, but regardless, it's annoying. Given the behemoth size of KDE, I expect there will be a lot of this kind of problem for a long time. Who knows when KDE4 will be stable in Gentoo, for example. One good thing about KDE3 is that a lot of these little bugs have been worked out already.
• Kickoff, the KDE launcher menu replacement, is no fun at all. There's way too much wasted space and you have to mouseover and click a million times to open anything. Same with the new-style control panel. You have the option of switching back to the old-style menu, which is a good thing.

• There are a lot of funky compiz-like animations that you can enable. Transparency, desaturating or tinting or dimming windows, and fading / exploding / zooming window animations etc. At this point, given Compiz and OS X and Vista which have mostly the same things and have been out for a while, these features are nothing new or mind-blowing, but it's nice to have them built into KDE if you like that kind of thing.
• Dolphin in KDE4 has some nice new features that my KDE3 version is missing, like a split-column view, and the ability to show thumbnail previews in more situations.
• The panel configuration window is gone, replaced with a neat graphical WYSIWYG kind of thing. You drag the panel edges to resize it, and click some buttons to alter the justification (right, center, left). It's nice, but after playing around a bit, when I tried to resize my panel to be 100% of the width of the screen, I had a lot of trouble; I had a pixel or two between the panel and the edge of the window. That's the problem with WYSIWYG: it's not as precise or fast as just typing "100%" into a text field.

• Many KDE apps aren't ported to QT4 yet, apparently. This introduces YET ANOTHER look-and-feel for Linux. Now I have to find a GTK2 theme, a QT3 theme and a QT4 theme. There are a few unified themes (qtcurve for example) that work for all three and look essentially the same, but there are only a few and the choices are limited.

• With animations disabled, when I open a menu I get a second of garbage as my video card freaks out trying to render it, before the menu appears. I can't imagine what the problem is there. KDE3 never does that on the same computer.

• Confusingly, deleting an icon from the desktop doesn't delete the file, it just removes the icon. Then I made a "folder view", which is a desktop applet that displays icons for an arbitrary folder, optionally filtering the folder by name. It's a neat idea. I'm unsure it's neat enough to replace the whole concept of a desktop full of files. Regardless, when I made one, it overlapped all the icons on my desktop to the point where I couldn't get it sorted out and had to remove it. What's the difference between icons directly on my desktop, and icons in a Folder View? It's very confusing to me, a long-time KDE user, so it's probably confusing to mostly everyone.
• The version of KDM that comes with KDE4 looks nice, but also crashes randomly.

However, my biggest problem with KDE4 is how sluggish it feels on my laptop. KDE3 runs very smoothly, but KDE4 lags left and right, when resizing windows, opening popup menus, clicking icons to open applications, or doing much of anything. It may be I need to upgrade my video card driver (I'm not sure if mine is properly hardware-accelerated), but should I really NEED to, just to run a window manager? KDE was never what you might call "lightweight" but it seems to be even further from that ideal now.

It'll be a while before I switch from KDE3 to KDE4 on my main workstation. It looks promising and there's clearly tons of potential. But it wouldn't be my first choice of environment for getting work done at the moment.

I haven't done much with my GUI for a good long while. I've been more focused on making it functional rather than pretty. I decided to see what I've been missing the the realm of KDE theming. Apparently I've been missing a lot. This Domino theme is on par with anything in Gnome. It's the complete opposite of the bulky, cartoonish look KDE has by default. Very subtle and soft and I think it looks tasty. The rounded menus and slightly 3D text almost make it look like Englightenment.

I am running a game and I need to take many screenshots of the game window. There are lots of Linux tools that take screenshots: scrot, import (part of ImageMagick), gnome-screenshot, ksnapshot, and the GIMP does it too.

It turns out none of them does EXACTLY what I want, on its own. My requirements are:

1. Take a snapshot via a single configurable keystroke.
2. Save it in a directory of my choosing.
3. Take a snapshot of a SINGLE window. And crop off the window borders. I need to take way too many snapshots to have time to go around editing them afterwards.
4. Look at what files already exist in the directory I pick, and give the new file a filename that is next in ascending order after the files that already exist. It should pad the filename out to 5 digits.
5. Do all of this non-interactively. It shouldn't ask me to confirm.

The way I finally ended up doing this is using import; I wrote a script to use it, and I assigned that script to a keystroke in my window manager. And once again, it's Ruby to the rescue:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

Dir.chdir('/SOME/DIRECTORY') do
    begin
        num = sprintf '%05d', Dir.glob('*').select{
            |x| x.match(/^\d+\.png/)
        }.sort[-1].match(/^(\d+)/)[1].to_i + 1
    rescue Exception => e
        puts e
        num = '00001'
    end
    raise "How'd that happen?" if File.exist? "#{num}.png"
    `import -window 'NameOfWindow' #{num}.png`
end

That this kind of thing is possible is why I love Linux. I can do so much more. I can have it save in multiple file formats. I can have it generate thumbnails as it saves new snapshots. (It's so easy to generate all the thumbnails later using convert that I'm not going to bother.) I could timestamp the filenames rather than using incrementing integers. (There is a race condition in this script that would be fixed if I did this, but I don't care enough to do it that way.)

Haven't posted one in a while. Gnome + Beryl, Buuf icons, MurrinaNeoGraphite GTK theme. I caught a window in mid-closing-animation, but I thought it looked neat so I left it.

Click for full-size version. In the first shot you can see the "wave" effect in progress that occurs any time a window is unmapped; the window sort of waves and dissolves. Beryl's "Animations" plugin lets you specify animations for mapping, unmapping, focusing, and min/maxing windows. There are some nice effects too, like the "genie getting sucked into a bottle" thing that OS X has, and many others. Either these things are new or I never noticed them before.

Too many effects really does get on your nerves after a while though. For example you can set windows to "shiver" very slightly when focusing them. The little bit of feedback does help you notice when a window is being focused, and given a dense collection of windows it can help you notice WHICH window is being focused. But switching window focus is something that happens way too often, and seeing your windows shivering for the 40,000th time is liable to drive a person insane.

I'm running KDE here. My collection of Conky scripts continues to grow. I plan to upload more of them as I refine them enough that they're usable by anyone other than myself. My first thought is always "Ew, look how many instances of Ruby I'm spwaning, running all those scripts!" My second thought is that I have a dual-core processor and 2 GB of RAM. 99% of the time, my CPU is sitting there idling. I could probably set it to spawn an instance of Ruby every second without noticing any difference. Three or four every 5 minutes isn't going to kill anyone.

A new screenshot:

This is KDE/Xgl/Compiz with a Milkish sort of cgwd theme. Just enough transparency to make things interesting. Of course Compiz is best when you see it in action.

The wallpaper from Interfacelift. Such a nice wallpaper.

There are plenty of nice Compiz themes at compiz.net. Here's Milk, which I've always liked. KDE + Compiz is just too nice:

Since taking these screenshots, I've started using dual monitors. There's a good FAQ on the Gentoo Wiki about setting up TwinView. It honestly couldn't be easier. I don't know how I got along with only one monitor before now. It's so much nicer with two.

The only bad thing about TwinView is that you can't specify which screen is your "main" screen. As seen in this thread, this is a limitation of the nvidia drivers. Kind of sucks, but KDE's support for dual screens makes up for nvidia's lack. You can force Kicker to be on one or the other screen or both; you can set wallpaper for each independently; etc. Full-screening most apps works fine. It all works perfectly fine with XGL/Compiz too.

Linux has come so far in the past 5 or 6 years. It's really quite amazing.