LaserJock

I’ve been using my laptop quite a bit lately. I’ve been working on my PhD dissertation and taking my laptop back-and-forth from home to school every day. I started  noticing that my wrist was really beginning to hurt. I decided to try to find a better window manager for keyboard use.

I tried a bunch and ended up using Xmonad in Gnome for a while. Xmonad is a really nice tiling window manager written in Haskell (which I don’t know). Since I normally run my two primary apps, Firefox and gnome-terminal/terminator, maximized I didn’t notice to big of a difference. However, some apps just don’t fit all that well in a tiling WM model and I’m thinking of switching back to metacity/compiz. However, I want to keep the ability to primarily use the keyboard.

So, I wonder what kind of tricks/tips you all have for running “mouseless” in Ubuntu?

After Jonathan Thomas’ nice overview of KDE 4.2 Beta 1 I decided to give it a go. I’ve been mostly a Gnome guy for the past few years but I’ve been keeping my eye on KDE 4, as many people have. Each time there’s a new release I give it a test drive and while it’s certainly flashy I usually find too many bugs, incomplete implementations, and a lacking usability. That’s certainly to be expected for a platform that large changing as much as it is, but it’s still not great when you’re just trying to get some work done.

So, today I installed Kubuntu 8.10 on a spare partition and upgraded it to to 4.2 Beta 1 and I’m really impressed. KDE 4 is really getting to be functional for me. It’s always looked slick and had that new technology “smell” but with 4.2 I think it’s really getting to where I could use it daily. So well done KDE! Well done to the Kubuntu packaging team!