Paranoid Idealism

So, I’m sort of ashamed of myself. You see, I’ve become something of a fan of Windows 7. This sort of bothers me because, until now, I’ve been a devoted Linux user and supporter. I’ve never been a fan of general Microsoft bashing, although they’ve done plenty in the past to warrant bashing. I tend to believe in using the best tool for the job, and for me, until now, that was Linux.

Windows 7 may have changed that. I’ve been using the beta and release candidate since they were released. It has been extremely stable, looks good, and is very configurable. I love the new taskbar. It’s got all the benefits of the Mac OS X dock (few though they are) and none of the drawbacks. And it stays out of the way. For once, Windows is letting me just get stuff done.

I’m not sure what to do about this. I still love Linux. I would much prefer to be running it on my laptop. But, in Windows 7 everything “just works.” That, and I’ve gotten so used to the new Windows 7 taskbar with its jumplists and the rest that I have a hard time going back to Gnome’s or KDE’s simple taskbar. I have yet to try the newest KDE 4 update, but it’s looking better. Ubuntu’s new theme for Gnome is a definite improvement. I really dig the monochrome system tray icons. I’ll have to give them another try. For now I’ve been running a few different distributions and desktop environments in VirtualBox on my Windows 7 laptop.

To be honest though, I’m not really planning to change.

I’ve just spent the better part of a day installing various distros on my laptop. I’ll talk about the ones I tried and why I didn’t like them in another post. I wound up sticking with the latest alpha of Kubuntu 9.04. It’s not perfect (what OS is?) but it’s pretty good so far. I have high hopes for the final release. My biggest problem with it so far has been fonts. They’re broken in so many ways. I’m typing this in Firefox right now, and I have it set to use KDE’s fonts. The WordPress console looks OK, but the text that I’m typing looks horribly broken. Varous parts of the UI look too big, while other parts look too small.

One thing I’m really glad to see is choqoK, a newish KDE client for identi.ca and Twitter. However, it too suffers from the screwed up fonts. It’s only at 0.4, so it’s got some time before I start seriously criticizing it. I’m actually planning to download the source and see if there’s anything my limited coding skills can do to help.

I like the new Network Manager Plasma applet. It still needs some polish, but it looks good even now, in its alpha form.

I’ve missed having a usable KDE since the 4.0 release. I’ve liked where KDE was heading, but I just couldn’t make the pre 4.2 releases usable for my day-to-day computing. 4.2 has finally done it for me. I can’t wait to see where it goes next. There’s so much potential in the 4.x series. It should be exciting.