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Switching to Arch and XFCE

Tue 27 Mar 2012 by mskala Tags used: , ,

I am, as the title implies, switching my home desktop system from Slackware Linux and KDE to Arch Linux and XFCE. You may see some minor disruptions here (in particular, the astrological chart generator may be down or unreliable) for the next few days. The switch is a pretty big production; I've been using Slackware for most of the last 20 years, and KDE for most of the time I've been using Slackware, and because I've been doing continuous incremental upgrades instead of full reinstalls, some parts of my system actually are that old.

There was no one big annoyance or disaster to make me want to switch, but my dissatisfaction with KDE has been gradually increasing for the last few years, and I decided it would be better to switch in a controlled way when I'm not fighting a fire, rather than wait until some kind of disaster forces me to switch under pressure. I'm still basically satisfied with Slackware, and I could have continued to use it, but I tried doing a similar KDE to XFCE switch on my laptop first to debug the process, and found that doing a complete reinstall of the underlying Linux distribution really makes the desktop change a lot pleasanter. Given that I'm doing a reinstall of the core Linux system, it seems like a good opportunity to also do the switch to Arch, which has some advantages over Slackware.

My gripes with KDE are no big secret, but just for amusement value I'd like to set down the biggest ones again. As I was considering this change and starting to think about pros and cons of doing it, I came to the realization that it was silly of me to be even considering continuing to use KDE, when about the only thing from KDE I still really like is its PDF viewer. Here are some of the reasons I no longer want to use KDE.

So far the installation of Arch and XFCE is going well. I'm posting occasional updates on the upgrade status to my Twitter stream, should you want to hear about it. The new stuff is not without its own annoyances - so far the biggest being GRUB's poor support of RAID, and Arch's lack of support for bringing up a system without /usr for recovery - but I'm generally pleased with it.

6 comments

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You are officially cheered on! Your Tweets seem to be echoed on Facebook so I'll see them there.
Axel - 2012-03-28 09:37
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I went back to fvwm (and xdm for login) about a decade ago, and it has quietly abstained from annoying me since.
kiwano - 2012-03-28 09:45
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Yikes! My old box (about fourteen years old) died yesterday. Irreparable main disk malfunction. I have ordered a new tower and shall install when Mercury goes direct; operating for now on an Ubuntu demo disk.
Axel - 2012-03-29 22:53
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The present Mercury retrograde seems to be hitting everybody pretty hard. Normally I don't pay any attention to them. I wonder what's different about this one - or if in fact it's some other effect and not Mercury at all.
Matt - 2012-03-30 09:33
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The worst was probably the 27th-28th soon after the turning point, when the Moon was in late Taurus making SA=LU/ME. As Mercury goes back over the same area another hard time should be 12th April with the Moon in Capricorn and LU=ME/SA.
Axel - 2012-03-30 12:35
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I only like Konsole: but kKill kDE!!! Yay! (Warmest regards from Singapore)
catmaker - 2012-05-11 03:47


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