Green Tech Girl

I’ll admit, something rubbed me the wrong way when I read “The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment.” There seemed to be this underlying message that women weren’t naturally “geeky” enough to get Linux, and that anyone who does get Linux must just be a “geeky programmer or designer.” His suggestion to improve Linux?

I’d love to see a welcome screen for the first time you open up your desktop, with little videos explaining a few key concepts to how Linux and Ubuntu work. Maybe it could ask “What do you want to do?” and then explain how they could do this.

Oh God no. The first thing I do when I get into Windows is turn off that stupid animated paper clip. You know the one I’m talking about, the creepy one with the happy face. But even Windows doesn’t assault me with cheesy training videos upon login – why should Linux? (more…)

Back in the day, I used to go to CompUSA with my live-in boyfriend as the quick alternative to Fry’s. Somewhere along the line, CompUSA degenerated into a shell of itself, a dirty, disheveled store with absent customer service.

I went to CompUSA about two years ago to purchase a new computer, with a $600 budget. Having found a model I wanted, I waited around for a sales rep to get the actual computer for me. (The boxes were in the back.) Twenty minutes later, after asking for help, I still had no response in a quiet, dead store. I walked out, telling the cashier that they had just lost a $600 sale. I was not surprised when the store closed down as part of a massive “gutting” of the corporation. (more…)

KDE4, I hardly knew ya. But alas, I must end our fledging relationship. I liked your glossy style, your promise of flashy desktop candy. But your stability leaves something to be desired…and when you break completely upon a regular update…well, what can a girl do? I’m sad to say, I must leave you and go for the more stolid, stalwart, simple man over there known as GNOME. He’s a bit pedestrian, I know, but he mostly keeps my computer running without a hitch (barring ATI conflicts with Compiz-Fusion).

Perhaps some day you will mature and we can try again. Until then, I will cherish my sweet memories of your plasma goodness.

Interesting article from BBC News about America’s oil addiction, quite critical of the American way of life, and yet strangely optimistic. “We will be recharging our car batteries much as we recharge our phone batteries” – I hope so.

I have to amend my last blog post that said that I was going to stick with KDE over GNOME, despite some issues. I installed KDE 4.1 Beta 2, and it’s not just going two steps forward and one step back, it’s possibly going three steps back. It crashes. Well, that can be expected from a beta, but my biggest complaint is that the stupid plasma widgets on the desktop still have the unwieldly borders and mini-icons surrounding them. I just want to be able to slap a file on my desktop and move it around without having to lock and unlock widgets to do so.

With this disappointment, I am switching back to GNOME (keeping KDE as an option) until the official KDE 4.1 release at the end of July. If the desktop widgets are still in their annoying state, I’ll have to hose KDE and go back to GNOME for the foreseeable future, except for my old laptop, which I’ll keep on KDE 3.5. Oh well.

When I first started using Linux on my laptop, I really had no clue that I could make a choice between the desktop environment. I just used the default that came with Ubuntu, which was GNOME. Now I know that you can choose a variety of desktops for Linux. Most Linux distributions will have one as the default, but you can always add another one later.

The two most popular Linux desktop environments are GNOME and KDE. Both GNOME and KDE look and feel like Windows, with some differences, of course. (more…)