The Fellowship / Fellows / shane / Communicating freely

Communicating freely

Thoughts on how we can all talk a little easier, and how that can make life better.

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Day 2 begins

Interestingly enough, I found myself looking forward to using my computer this morning.  Now that my basic training wheels are off, I'm planning to put KDE 4 through an intense day of high pressure productivity.

We have documents to create, we have emails to send, we have stuff to file.

The one thing slightly bothering me is that I cannot quite work out the Plasma desktop thing.  I need to read the manual I guess. 

Click menu, in search type help...help centre opens.  Let's see...

Ah.  It's empty.  Completely blank.  That's not a good sign.

Let's try the package manager.  Adept.  Click.  Ooh...lots of options.  "kde help" keyword.  Hm.  Nothing.  I need another keyword.  Helpcentre perhaps?  Hm.  Nope.  US spelling then.  Helpcenter.  That worked.  It says KDE 4 helpcenter  is installed.  Well, the application is...but my help files appear to be missing.

Either I am doing something wrong, or there is something wrong.  I go back into the helpcenter.  Contents are blank.  Hm.  I click glossary.  Oh, this might have content. 

No.  It has a list of things, but when I click them I get a blank HTML page with just headline text.  Something is not working here.

OK, deducting some points there.  I can't work out Plasma desktop and when I try to get help, there is no help.  I think that's the largest bug I have come across; given that Plasma is a very interesting and powerful new technology, people really need to be told how to use it clearly.  It's also reasonable to expect that people need to be told through their desktop help system rather than having to wander around the net.

I'm not dead

Goodness me, a complete office day has finished and KDE 4 is chugging along nicely.

What went right?  Well, a lot.  It was smooth, fast and did not crash. I like the interface.  Dolphin is a pleasure (apart from its weird habit of sending error messages after successfully opening files) and I can work out how to change any setting I don't like.  Performance on average appears to be at least twice that of GNOME 2.22.

What went wrong?  I noticed another slight bug in the interface, this time with Bittorrent downloads.  Some kind of distorted icon thing appeared in the system tray on the taskbar (a download indicator?) but it's obviously crashed or non-functional, so I have a persistent mess of random pixels in one system tray location.  No doubt this will disappear when I reboot.

My productivity was a little lower than Friday.  Sometimes I would have to spend a couple of seconds working out how to do something with the new interface.  However, I doubt I lost more than five minutes throughout the day.  I don't expect any productivity reduction at all tomorrow.

Overall, I'm happy. It's my birthday, so I'll regard this nice new desktop as a present from KDE.  Let's see what happens next (I'm such a tough customer).

If this week works out, do we need to create a "Freedom Task Force: Powered by KDE 4" logo?


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