by Carla Schroder
Managing Editor
Another year has flown by. There just aren’t enough lifetimes to
do everything. I’m taking next week off and have all kinds of fun
projects planned: build shelves, build a worktable, and clean up
the physical cruft that accumulates when I’m not looking.It might be a good time to settle on a Linux environment for my
main workstation. I’m giving up on KDE4. Maybe I should have kept
Debian Stable/KDE 3 going a little longer, but I succumbed to
upgrade temptation. That was a mistake. Me and KDE4, we just don’t
get along. Especially not on a wimpy single-core Sempron with only
a gigabyte of RAM. (That’s sarcasm in case you missed it.) I’ve
been testing XFCE, LXDE, FVWM, and other graphical environments on
Debian Sid, and there is a lot to like. They fly on that “old”
Sempron machine. XFCE is a lot like a stripped-down KDE3: lots of
customization and nice organization that fits the way I work. FVWM
is super-customizable and pretty. Gnome is quite usable, at last,
though I really want to use something that is not Gnome or KDE.
TrinityKDE, the revival of KDE3, is also on my radar.I’m spending a lot of time with Arch Linux and liking it a lot.
It’s more work to set up, which is fine with me because the
tradeoff is a transparent, controllable system that does what I
want. Arch takes a different approach: instead of continually
reinventing the wheel and coming up with newer, buggier, and
less-capable graphical config tools, or automating everything
poorly, they invest that energy into first-rate documentation. I’ve
had enough of distros like Ubuntu and openSUSE that try to do
everything for you, but they don’t do it well enough to rely on,
and they make it nearly impossible for users to diagnose and fix
problems.My New Year’s resolution is the same one as always: Keep my
dreams front and center! It is so easy to get derailed. Life is too
short to waste. I wish everyone a Happy New Year, may it be better
than last year, and may your dreams come true!