Internal Dialogue

There’s been a lot that I wanted to write about the past few days, but just haven’t taken the time. I quickly blame it on writers block, but I figure I don’t write enough to get a real writers block. I did however write down a few chunks now and then; it’s just not one coherent story yet. But I guess the things I want to say diverge so much from each other that the following will be quite chaotic.

First off, I finally got two pending study grades entered into my dossier. One of them was almost two years overdue. Somewhere I know I should be happy, but knowing that I still have a lot to do before I can get my bachelors degree I’m not too excited about this. Which is weird, because it took me five years to finish a course that I should have finished in my first year!Oh well, like I said, there’s still more work to do. I have to find an internship to graduate on. Luckily I’ve finally made some progress today, and I hope to have picked a few favorites by the end of the week. Hopefully I can put this whole thing together before my graduation period begins. As always I’m ridiculously late. It’s strange, during the ten months that I’ve worked (previous internships) I didn’t put off work this often. But when it comes to my studies I’m really hard to motivate. I wish I would have finished years ago, but it’s a bit late for that. I just hope my school won’t complain about me taking so long to find an internship.

Anyway, before I start I still have to finish the two courses I’m working on now. Which reminds me: if anyone knows a subject I can write a short blog about (it should be e-publishing related): tell me! We need to write four blogs about all things new-media publishing, but so far I’ve only managed to come up with one subject I was excited about. I could probably write three blogs right now if I lowered my standards, but I feel to strong about my writing to just give them the same (old) crap that others do.

Anyway, besides these two courses there’s one more assignment that I’ve never finished and need to redo before I can get my degree, but right now I wouldn’t mind doing that after my internship. I guess the smartest thing to do is talk to my study advisor and ask him what he thinks is best.

Even though there’s still a lot to do, this thing finally feels close. But it doesn’t feel real yet. When I’ve arranged my internship I’m sure I’ll get that feeling as well. It’s just that I’ve taken so long that I didn’t really realize I would one day finally see the beginning of the end. Now that I’m here, it feels weird.

Something entirely different: I upgraded my desktop to Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Combined with the fact that the new version was about to be released soon anyway, I wanted to give KDE 4.1 a try. I was quite dissapointed with 4.0, and I was hoping this version would be a lot better.

But it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. I must admit that it looks great – there’s no denying that this version of KDE feels much more modern and, to a certain extent, mature. Previous versions were good, but still felt very ‘playful’. BUt 4.0 feels very elegant. It’s a big improvement and the new features are very handy. I always thought Mac OS X was a very elegant yet pretty OS – certainly more so than Windows – but I have to say that KDE 4.0 is my new favorite. Of course you can theme it and change the way it looks, but the standard theme is very well worked out. It finally feels like a modern desktop.

Yet there’s a downside. Even though I’ve been using Linux on my desktop for almost two years now, I’ve come to see that there’s still much work to do before this can really reach the masses. Much is to blame on the hardware and the companies behind them that won’t release (proper) drivers. But even so, there’s still much work to do. Right now, KDE still has quite a few bugs. Most of them are graphical in nature, but there are also quite a few things that can be attributed to improper testing. In my eyes, the problem with Ubuntu is that they want to reach the masses, but work too quickly to properly test everything. They have quite a strict schedule – a new release every six months. They put in new features so fast that they sometimes don’t even properly fix the things that were wrong with the last ones. It’s great to have a distribution that’s up to date, don’t get me wrong. But I think the people behind Ubuntu (and KDE) have to accept the fact that not everything ‘just works’ yet on Ubuntu and that they need to spend more time on getting the older things to work right.

A small example: I’ve had ATI graphics cards for the past five years, but support under Linux is still quite pathetic. This can obviously not be blamed on the OS and the people who work on Ubuntu, but they have to ask themselves if it’s worth to enable all this eye-candy by standard if it doesn’t work properly on so many desktops? Eye-candy is great, but it should work seamlessly. Right now the Intel 945 in my laptop handles compiz fusion perfectly, there’s simply no delay or feeling of slowness whatsoever. But my ATI Radeon 850 XT can’t even handle the most simple eye-candy on my Kubuntu KDE 4.0 desktop. It’s ridiculous… and I wonder if it’s really down to improper hardware support. I mean, OpenGL does work and all the effects are there, but it’s just all very slow and Xorg takes up a ridiculous amount of CPU cycles. I can even see certain parts of a program being (slowly) redrawn when I minimize or maximize a window. Not to mention how unnatural scrolling (with, for example, Firefox) feels. It’s just so laggy and slow!

Which is a shame, because KDE 4.0 really falls short for me. Eye-candy is not only about prettiness, but also about usability. If I can have a live preview of my window when I alt-tab, than that’s great. But it should work out of the box. For everyone. Not just the people with the right video card that works. These things shouldn’t, in my opinion, be enabled by default. When I turned off all the desktop effects, KDE 4.0 finally felt quick. But a large part of what made KDE so great was now missing. It didn’t look so good anymore.

All in all, I know I can’t blame this on Kubuntu, Linux, Xorg or KDE. They do the best they can, and even though I’ve only touched on the subject of graphics the OS is really, very good. Yet it still doesn’t work out of the box on every single PC, and that’s a shame. I’m willing to accept a certain level of user input: I like it when I learn more about my OS. But these things I can’t fix. I just wish they themselves would test their OS on more setups than just the ones it works on.

This doesn’t mean I’ll give up KDE 4.0, but for now I guess I have to turn off a few features that I actually really like, just because for me they slow down the entire OS. I don’t want to, but I guess I’ll have to because even the opening screen of OpenTTD visibly lags – which is ridiculous!