I’ve distro hopped quite a bit over the last few years. I’ve realized recently that I tend to gravitate toward KDE Plasma as a desktop environment, but I don’t take advantage of the customization as much as I could.
As I sit here looking through the KDE Plasma settings I’m curious to hear what are some favorite things to change in any DE. Please share what you like to do when you get a vanilla install. Do you have a favorite icon pack? Do you have a favorite theme? Any particular widgets that you would recommend?
I’m sure there is more out there than I can think of. Please share!
Edit: I can’t respond to everyone, but this is a great discussion. So many good suggestions and ideas. Keep them coming!
I always install Guake. It’s a drop-down terminal emulator and it can be heavily configured with hotkeys. I have it pop open/close with one key and I can split the terminal horizontally or vertically as many times as I want with a couple other hotkeys.
It’s so ridiculously efficient (as a developer) that I can’t stand to not have it installed at this point.
What’s better with a drop down terminal vs a normal terminal invoked with global short key?
It’s a genuine question, never heard about drop down terminal and looked it up. As I understand they are just normal terminal with a visual effect when they open. Am I missing something?
I’ve used a drop down terminal before and I find the position convenient. I can never lose it among other windows and it’s always on top. If I want to see below, I just slide it back.
Your point is correct, it is functionally nearly identical. Since the terminal is arguably the most important or most central piece of software, I do find it convenient to always have it in the same place and to give it priority over other windows.
This is definitely a matter of opinion, I do admit
It really has nothing to do with the opening animation, in fact, I’m not even sure if Guake has an animation. It’s about having a self contained terminal “window” where all of your terminals live and you can quickly navigate between them. Then you can hide said window just as fast as it arrived and get back to what you were doing. Keep in mind, these drop down terminals are not treated as traditional windows and are always-on-top.
The problem with traditional terminal windows is: let’s say that I have 4 terminals up for different tasks; it causes a little friction to my workflow when I have to deal with which window is which. That friction is just not present with a drop-down. Of course, you can have a traditional terminal emulator that supports tabs and splitting and set a hotkey to bring the one window into focus with an always-on-top flag; at that point though, you’ve just recreated another drop-down.
Love my drop down terminal. I use Yakuake.
Once you get used to it, you’ll never go back haha
Do you prefer Guake over Yakuake because you use Gnome or other GTK based DE, because of specific features, or because it’s what you’re used to? Or something else?
I’ve only used Yakuake (and I’m on KDE) so I’m not familiar with Guake, but I’m curious
I’ll be real with you, it’s just familiarity. Whenever I’m setting up a new system, I just install Guake and throw my config file at it, so it feels the same as all of my other computers.
I’m sure that Yakuake is great and that all drop-down terminals probably have identical feature sets. However, I’m getting too old and impatient to distro/software hop. I just like my stuff to work and as long as it does, I don’t change it.
Concerning DE compatibility though: I run cinnamon on most of my machines and Guake has worked flawlessly for me for years on Cinnamon and Gnome. I’ve never been a fan of KDE though, so your milage may vary.