Moving to GNOME

Probably everyone knows, I've been a KDE fanatic for the past decade. And thus I installed the latest KDE4 packages on Kubuntu. Unfortunately many icons where missing in the Ubuntu packages, which made me decide to give SUSE's KDE4Live a try, which I installed on the hard disk of Pleunix. However openSUSE did not live up to my expectations and thus I replaced it with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, using the GNOME desktop environment.

At first planned to install KDE right the way, but while I was playing around with GNOME and took a look at the Gnome-Look site, I came to the conclusion, that there was not any longer a reason to drop Gnome in favor of KDE.

The last time, I seriously used GNOME was on Fedora Core 2 (which is considered ancient by now in the GNU/Linux community). In the meantime GNOME has come along the way. And when ether you like it or not, it has become even more easy and to "pimp it up" then KDE (at least for the 3 series of KDE. What's ahead for KDE, only time will tell). So I'm not running out of conclusions here.

I won't bore you with the installation and configuration process of Ubuntu, because that was (as expected) a piece of cake (not even worth mentioning).

Just wanted to share some screenshots of my new desktop. (click to enlarge to 1024x768)

Meet my desktop

I've been playing around with a program called Istanbul, which is a desktop session recording program and here is the result, a short video in Ogg-Tehora format. Due to the lack of (hardware) resources, many of the frames unfortunately have been skipped.

Anyway it shows what my desktop currently looks like and shows the concept of multiple desktop spaces, providing the ability of running multiple applications full screen simultaneously. As you can see, the desktop is (30%) transparent, using the Beryl manager and Emerald theme manager.

Still think GNU/Linux is a out of date, sluggish HobbyOS eh?

Istanbul if available for free and Free, from most GNU/Linux distribution's repositories