I'm sort of tired of KDE4 crashing left and right and Plasma barfing all over me all day. So I decided to check out the current state of lightweight window managers.

Lo and behold, Fluxbox is still going strong. It was the first WM I used way back in 2000-something when I started using Linux full-time. Last time I tried, there were always weird compatibility problems with system tray icons and pagers working properly when running a mix of KDE and Gnome and other apps, but those seem to have cleared up nicely; I have yet to hit any snags. Here's a screenshot.

This took very minimal effort to install and set up. Maybe a couple hours total. I'm using ipager and conky. The wallpaper comes from the UniQ KDE theme. Vim and Emacs themes are my own.

The Fluxbox style is mydefcon_4 from tenr.de which is probably the largest and most thorough set of themes created by one person that I've witnessed. That fellow is motivated.

For all the bells and whistles of KDE4, what features did I actually use regularly?

1. A menu of apps
2. Taskbar + System tray + Clock
3. KWin's good window management.
4. Global keyboard shortcuts galore
5. One widget: current CPU/RAM/Network usage
6. Mouse/keyboard management, background-setting, etc.

Fluxbox gives me all but number 5, and Conky gives me that. Number 6 you can do with xset and feh and such.

And I like being motivated to use keyboard shortcuts for more things. I'm already halfway there. Maybe I can take the plunge eventually and try a tiling window manager. Not sure I've reached that level of nerditude yet though.

And now I can move and resize windows without my graphics card bursting into flames. Maybe when I can afford a few more cores worth of CPU I'll try KDE4 again. Honestly I think I have too much monitor real-estate for my ancient computer to handle smoothly in KDE4.

Not to knock KDE4; it's awesome and I'll probably go back someday. But everyone needs a break now and then.

I put a color scheme for KDE4's Konsole up for download. From a cursory glance I think KDE3 and KDE4 color schemes are the same format, but I haven't tried it.

Also I know I'm not the first to say it, but all of the K's in KDE program names are a bit annoying after a while, aren't they?

Note to self. Vim color schemes that only set cterm colors don't work unless you export TERM=xterm-256color in your terminal emulator. Konsole in KDE4 seems to default to plain xterm. Took me a half hour to figure out why my color scheme wasn't working in Konsole.

From reading the bug it sounds like KDE4 is getting close to being ready to hit the tree, which is awesome. Foolishly, I decided to try it early from the overlay last night. It was a total disaster. Things were crashing left and right, panels would resize themselves to be fullscreen (with hilarious results), half of my apps didn't work at all. I found three or four ways to bring down the entire X server. It took me many hours to get KDE3 running again. This is totally to be expected from installing masked packages as I did, so it's my own dumb fault, it was amusing and I wanted to get a taste.

I'm afraid it's going to be inevitably difficult or impossible to migrate cleanly from KDE3 to KDE4. I had the same problem in Kubuntu when I tried a while back. KDE is so huge and so many things link to it or interact with it that it's going to take a year to track down and remove all the cruft after the switch.

I couldn't even import my old KDE3 color schemes or Konsole color schemes into KDE4, which was surprising. QtCurve was un-configurable, dekorator didn't work, and so on. I didn't get far enough to figure out if my preferred icon themes work or not. I didn't realize they broke backwards compatibility to that large an extent, but I maybe it's to be expected.

There were other problems that were seemingly due to the lingering immaturity of KDE4. I can see all the pieces there which are going to allow people to do really neat stuff eventually. In the meantime KDE4 feels horrible.

KDE4 fonts look nice though.

I've been using this theme forever and I'm thinking of changing it, so I wanted to grab some screenshots before I did. I have bandwidth to kill anyways, so enjoy my 3.5 MB PNGs.

My KDE color scheme is here, my QTCurve config is here, my Konsole theme is here, my Vim colors are here, the icons are Buuf, and I uploaded those wallpapers.

I really need to re-upload all the screenshots I took over the past 5 years. That was always one of the more popular sections of the site, for whatever reason.

For a long time in Gentoo, if I had the "Use my KDE style in GTK applications" option selected in KDE, certain themes would cause all GTK apps to fail to even start. Only certain QT themes did it though. Domino for example, which happens to be my favorite QT app.

I also had some redraw problems with GTK apps no matter what QT theme I used. When changing between virtual desktops, bits and pieces of certain GTK apps wouldn't redraw properly until I moved them around or resized them. And as I mentioned an entry or two ago, I had some lag problems when switching between desktops in general. Nothing show-stopping. Just barely bad enough to annoy me at times.

Strangely, all of those problems seem to have been corrected. Must've been something fixed in the past month. Or maybe something on my system was b0rked and the slew of updates that accumulated over the past month caused me to have to recompile something that fixed it. That included a new version of xorg, tons of KDE apps, a new nvidia driver, and lots of other things, and I upgraded freetype to the latest keyworded version. I wish I knew what it was in particular that fixed things so well. Such are the mysteries of Gentoo.

I use a dark QT theme. Many web pages (example: Youtube) have CSS which sets text fields to have black text, but don't set the background color of text fields to be anything. So the background color ends up being my default dark (set by my browser / window manager), but the text in the fields is set by the page's CSS to be black, so I can't read it.

This is incredibly annoying. If sites would either set BOTH the text color and background, or NEITHER the text color nor background, things would be readable. Picking one ends up causing a mess for anyone using a dark theme.

In Firefox to fix this I have to screw around with ~/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILE.default/chrome/userContent.css and force the font color of all my text fields to be white. This then screws up pages that style their text fields to have white backgrounds, so I have to force my background to be dark for all sites.

input {
    color: white !important;
    background: black !important;
}

However this looks horrible. Largely due to the fact that form elements in Firefox look like Windows 3.1 widgets to begin with.

In Opera on the other hand, I can go to Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Content -> Style Options... -> Enable Styling of Forms and disable all form styling on all web pages. This cause forms to revert back to their default appearance as decided by Opera. In Opera, the default appearance is often set by the theme you're using, so this is actually a nice option and gives nice-looking form widgets. You can also use a custom stylesheet in Opera similarly to Firefox where you can override the colors of form elements using CSS, if you so desire. It's in the same dialog box as the option above.

Any styling that a web page applied to make form widgets fit in better with the rest of the page is gone when do you do this kind of thing, but I'm willing to pay that price.