Want KDE 3.5 look and feel

Sun Sep 6 17:48:58 UTC 2009

It would appear that on Sep 5, Mark Halegua did say:

> On Saturday 05 September 2009 05:58:30 pm Rafael Alexandre Schmitt wrote:
> > I know this is not the answer you want, but I went back to gnome and
> > made it look like my "old" kde 3.
> >
> > Play a little bit with gnome , e17 and xfce , just to have some fun :o)
> 
> I appreciate the tip. I usually don't like gnome (one of my clients uses it on her company's
> desktops), I find it a little clumsy, especially compared with KDE 3.5, but who knows.
> 
> For the moment what I've done, since I think some of the problems went beyond the desktop,
> is do a fresh install of Linux Mint 7 for amd64, and that seems to be much better. I've
> installed the KDE desktop, 4.2.2 and will be trying to upgrade that to 4.3 as soon as I get
> something out of the way. I have learned how to get the classic KDE menu and I've managed to
> change some of the desktop to my liking.

Hello Mark, I think Rafael is giving you some good advice there.

I, like you, preferred the look & feel of kde3x over kde4x. And I also
never warmed up to gnome... (Of course, part of my reasons was being
very keyboard centric, due to having a hard time manipulating the mouse
properly... And when I tried gnome it seamed that way to many things
depended on knowing just where to right click on what... (Hmmmnnn no
wonder I didn't like what they did to kde4...)

Anyway when I figured out that KDE really was phasing out kde3x, And
that it seamed unlikely that the various Linux distros I use would be
keeping an optional version of kde3 as a viable option. I did as
Rafael suggests and looked into alternative desktops & window
managers. Unfortunately. it seamed most of them were extremely mouse
centric. But I found a reference somewhere about Enlightenment that
suggested it could be configured to do almost everything with the
keyboard... So I tried e16, which is an older version of
Enlightenment, readily available from fairly standard repos for many
distros including: Kubuntu, Sabayon, and OpenSuSE.
E16 runs well on top of a kde system (even a kde4x system) One of the
things I liked about e16 was that most of it's configuration files
were in an editable text format, which made it easier for me to learn
to customize it to my taste. But I worried that the, harder to
install, but newer version of Enlightenment called E17 might do to E16
what KDE4 is doing to KDE3, So I decided to check it out. It is a bit
harder to get, And still somewhat buggy by comparison to the very
stable E16, But there are some improvements, widgets & gadgets that
E16 didn't have.  And it doesn't look like they plan on throwing away
everything I liked about E16. So now most days I run E17.

One of the features that attracted me to E was that I can still assign a
different background image to each desktop area. (I associate certain
images with groups of related tasks I usually do on a given desktop
area. This keeps me from having to squint to see which desktop I'm in.) 

Both E16 & E17 load, and shutdown a *_LOT_* faster than KDE. And Most
kde applications play well with it. Though there are a few that
sometimes complain about not being able to talk to some kde daemon
process or other, (Kaffeine comes to mind) But generally when they do,
all I gotta do is click ok on the error message, and the application
opens anyway. The other short fall I notice involves system tray
dependent software... But it seams to me that the version of 
E17 I installed on Jaunty came with one in it's modules menu...

# http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-install-enlightenment-e17-in.html
#
# Authenticate key with...
# sudo wget -q http://packages.enlightenment.org/repo.key -O- | apt-key add -

deb http://packages.enlightenment.org/ubuntu jaunty main extras

> One of the designers has asked me what I don't and do like, so I'm
> working on a full list of my experiences with 4.3. We'll see after that.

Well that's good. I'm glad that someone who is still trying to use it
is talking to one of the designers... If they make kde4 into something
that will keep most kde3 diehards happy, then it will probably at least
keep on being a viable base for me to overlay with the E1[67] environment.
But if you get tired of it, do try the above repo... & if, Like me,
you happen to be very keyboard centric, feel free to ask me how I
quickly configure e17 to taste...

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|   <0>   <->	   Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
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