Plaidophile

So, for the last several months, Windows XP has been trying its hardest (and succeeding) to piss me off. The thing which pushed me over the edge was some ridiculous driver stuff that would have required me to just reinstall Windows anyway, and since the state of affairs regarding Linux support at work has changed again, I decided that now that I'm between projects I should finally take my chance to switch back to Linux.

I ended up installing Kubuntu, and then very soon afterwards transformed it into Ubuntu (which is pretty easy, since they're really just different package suites for the same master distribution).

I wanted to try out KDE4, but it turns out that its UI is phenomenally ridiculous. It's like they took all the wrong lessons from Vista. UI elements feel like they're just doing their own thing (in a very inconsistent way!) and, for whatever reason, nVidia's configuration GUI tool didn't work either, so just to get my multiple monitor setup going I installed Gnome, and then realized that hey, Gnome isn't all that bad. Especially the latest version, with Compiz settings set to "medium" which adds a lot of niceties.

The particular driver issues on Windows, incidentally, were:

• Hot-plugging devices made the "found new hardware" wizard appear EVERY TIME, even for things like USB HID and thumb drives and so on (i.e. things which should not have needed that), and every time I had to guide it specifically to c:\windows\inf (you know, where Windows already knows that it keeps its own drivers)
• The mouse driver would have little temporal hiccups and deliver events out-of-order. This meant that the cursor would randomly jump around, clicks would happen strangely (like, the app would get a mouse up event and then a second later get a mouse down!), and basically everything became really goddamn difficult to do since I couldn't even do simple things like selecting text reasonably

So, as an added bonus, I'd forgotten how profoundly fast the Linux version of our platform's cross-compilation toolchain was compared to the Windows one — it feels like it's about 5x as fast for the compiler, and amazingly fast for the linker and executable signer. It's a wonder why our tools people only officially support the Windows one anymore. (Sadly, the remote execution environment is Windows-only, and doesn't run under Wine, so I still need VMWare+WinXP around for that. Fortunately, that's a very small hassle compared to running Windows as the main OS.)

Oh, and other very nice things: Ubuntu actually detects and configures the WiFi chip in my laptop now, and aside from the vague fiddly issues with configuring my graphics (which were more KDE's fault than Linux's in general) getting everything working was very easy.

There's still some wonkiness with the GUI, though (for some reason, nVidia's "TwinView" thing doesn't prevent the mouse cursor from going into the unmapped regions, and some Compiz fiddliness seems to interact with TwinView fiddliness in odd ways). Unfortunately, TwinView seems to be the only way to get my GUI working at all — I can't seem to disable the laptop's built-in display, and setting it to use traditional detached-server Xinerama causes all sorts of weirdness to happen, since draw events seem to get sent to both displays. I remember having a similar problem to this with the Radeon on my dev system at Amazon, though (and similarly I ended up just using the proprietary GPU monitor-spanning stuff instead of Xinerama; however, there my two monitors were identical so I didn't have the wonky geometry issues), so maybe it's just a fundamental problem with Xorg and less to do with the individual drivers.

I think it'll take me a while to get Gnome set up in a way which doesn't annoy the hell out of me, but I'm already greatly enjoying the fact that I can actually set my fonts to be nice and tiny without things going wacky. X11's font rendering has actually gotten better than Windows', somehow. That just seems so bizarre to me.

Also, I'm still getting used to not having to worry about random mouse events when I move windows around. I keep expecting things to maximize weirdly or close or get clicked in aggravating ways. So, hooray for that!