As a slight distraction from my current fairly high level of "ohmygod I have to move house" stress and panic, I spent a good few hours this weekend playing with my desktop. This was brought on by some reading up on KDE4.. sod vista, I know what I'd rather use

First off - removing ALL icons.  I can't stand having more than about 3 icons on my desktop.  One of the (many) things I love about linux is that whenever I install something, I don't mysteriously end up with thousands of icons and shortcuts scattered all over the place.  aaah.
Most used programs are down on the taskbar (or left running all the time), and the wastebin is too.  Any other programs that I use are easily found on the menus.  Might shrink those icons a bit though, they're taking up quite a lot of space.  Might also lose the virtual desktop icons, seeing how I've had them for two years and used them about four times.  heh.

Next step - widgets!  Desktop widgets are fairly pointless actually.  But they're very shiny, especially as I've got them all set to be slightly see through.  Quite into transparency at the moment - it would be rather cool if I could get all unfocussed windows to be slightly transparent. mmm.

The weather forecast is very pointless, and probably won't stick around for long. Contacts list is useful - I've always had a contact list window open in about that position, so at least this way it blends in a bit better.  Could take a while to get used to having various peoples' ugly mugs staring out at me from the sides of my windows though, heh.  And look at Mark with his naughty sweary picture! tut tut.

System monitor thing is good though, in terms of displaying mostly useless info that I already know.  Note slightly pants uptime - I somehow managed to reboot the computer yesterday, which was annoying as I was only intending to restart X.  Uptime had been up to 15 days
It's also lacking in CPU temperature for some reason.  I dd some poking around and got told "No support for device type: thermal".  How useful   Will probably have to do some modprobing and other prodding to get that working.

Then when I got bored of widgets (might add one that shows my 'now listening' though, for extra pointlessness), I started on tweaking actual settings.  Now have smaller and slightly nicer fonts for things, tidier menus, a marginally better file save/open dialog in firefox and some other miscellaneous improvements.

 [slight edit - I remembered how to make everything see through!  it's ace but a bit laggy...]

tags: geeky linux