What happened?
Some things were just too annoying with awesome:
- cvlc -f not opening full screen, just sometimes, completely at random. When it didn’t, it froze. When it did, it slowed down everything. First I thought that it had something to do with VDPAU and tried to turn it off, but I didn’t even get that far.
- Maximizing a youtube-video in Chromium seemed to freeze the screen. Eventually I figured out that awesome decided to open it in the background or something. Surprisingly, maximizing the window in that state raised it. Learned that by accident.
- ffplay and mplayer windows centered right where they shouldn’t: between both screens.
Overall, a tiling window manager is nice when you use X just as a console multiplexer, but if you want more, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.
So I decided to give KDE another shot. I used it before, but eventually got annoyed by all the useless crap I don’t want nor need, like Akonadi or Nepomuk.
The Experience
So I replaced
exec awesome
with
exec startkde
in my .xinitrc. First thing I noticed was my CPU fan spinning up. Baloo_file decided to have my 6 CPUs work overtime. I found out that it is the new file indexer of the KDE framework. Don’t want it, don’t need it, but easily fixed. Just turn off the Desktop Search in System Settings. For good measure I also added
chmod -x /usr/bin/baloo_file
Other than that I’m quite happy with it. cvlc -f always starts full screen again, and a tabbed Konsole is so much nicer than a tiled urxvt 🙂 Chromium and youtube also work as expected again.
What I miss
What I really miss is separate desktops per screen, but from what I read that won’t be implemented soon, if ever. Well, you can’t have everything. Fortunately I found workarounds for most cases.