

What I use - cperciva
http://colin.percival.usesthis.com/

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cperciva
I'm not sure if this is of interest to anyone here, but we've had a few
usesthis articles in the past -- and I figure that even if nobody is
interested in what I use, people can talk about their own systems instead.

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wwortiz
I found it quite interesting that you seem to be a minority in the way you use
the desktop. I would have expected you to run a tiling window manager and
emacs or vim but it is somewhat refreshing (and interesting) that you use kde
with konquerer as your browser and kwrite for code.

As an aside do you use konsole for you console as well?

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cperciva
Yes, I usually have at least 5 Konsole windows open on various desktops.

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fs111
Love the pragmatism and what a relief to read that someone is not running a
Mac!

Any reason why you are still on KDE 3.x? The latest 4.x are finally getting
there, with some tweaking def. stable and usable.

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cperciva
I tried KDE 4 a while back (maybe last summer?) and didn't like it at all. I'm
very conservative in terms of UI -- my KDE3 desktop looks very much like the
Windows 95 desktop I used 10-15 years ago -- and all of the modern glitz
bothers me.

That said, I'll probably upgrade to KDE4 some time soon... and then disable
all of the distracting graphical features.

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w1ntermute
Seems like KDE 4 is stable enough for regular use, as long as you don't delve
into any of the more fancy features.

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cperciva
Yep, that's what I've been hearing. Right now the main thing holding me back
from upgrading is inertia.

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w1ntermute
I tried 4.0 in a VM upon release, and that scared me away from the 4.x series
until 4.2. Even in 4.2, I had a lot of issues because of my heavily customized
setup. I'd say that if you're happy with 3.5.x, stick with it as long as there
are no major security holes.

I got tired of basic functionality being broken even in 4.3, and left for
greener pastures (Openbox). I only briefly experimented with 4.4, so I can't
really comment on it (though from what I did see, I was not enamored at all).

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adbge
> The more fantastical option is a lightweight system with just enough power
> to run X and connect wirelessly to a server.

If you ever do build and use something like this, I'd like to read about the
experience. I have considered trying to do something of this kind, but I
always found the documentation on putting together thin clients to be woefully
incomplete.

I also found it surprising that you write all your code in Kate and it is
interesting that you're still on KDE 3.x (although I certainly understand why
you would shy away from 4.x).

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deno
Actually Kate is quite powerful. But he says he uses KWrite, which doesn't
even have tabbing/buffer support.

(This photo, btw, could really use some color/brightness auto-balance)

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d0m
From my experience, my colleague who were programming with kwrite and nano
were the worst programmer ever. Of course, this means absolutely nothing about
you. But maybe you don't see the point in the vim vs emacs war, however, don't
you like having a complete IDE to help you out?

And the idea of vim vs nano.. it's just that once you've learn a couple of
commands, you can't go back. And, once you've learn those obscure commands,
who want them everywhere. (Delete up to the next "(", vim got it easily)

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tmcw
My colleague who uses nano and kate exclusively is the best coder at the
company. Lots of great writers used crappy typewriters or pencil or pen. Who
cares?

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lelele
Correlation is not causation ;-)

Using simpler tools does not make you a better performer, albeit better
performers seem to prefer simpler tools.

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jorgecastillo
It's great to see an interview where Mac OS X is not the desktop OS of
preference. I don't dislike Mac OS X in fact I think it is the best UNIX
system for the average computer user. But considering that setups at
usesthis.com are of people more involved in IT, software development and the
Internet I would've thought that the share of OSes was less monotonous with
more Linux and a few more BSDs.

I also use KDE3.5 since OpenBSD doesn't have KDE4 although I really like and
think KDE3.5 is awesome.

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there
openbsd has had kde4 for quite some time.

<http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/x11/kde4/>

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mkramlich
I'd love to see a single site where this kind of thing is aggregated. At least
for famous programmers or leaders in the industry (eg. Guido, Linus, Carmack),
at a bare minimum, though regular joes could participate as well.

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Adrock
<http://usesthis.com/>

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mkramlich
LOL! man i'm an idiot. thanks for pointing that out. :)

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Mathnerd314
Any reason you don't use Thunderbird 3 / 3.1 ?

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nuclear_eclipse
Some of us dislike the new "features" in TB3, like:

\- opening a new tab for each email you read

\- or worse, double clicking on a collapsed thread opens a new tab _for each
email in the ENTIRE thread_...

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w1ntermute
_opening a new tab for each email you read_

This can be disabled. I don't use it.

