Amarok keyboard shortcuts

One of the biggest reasons that I decided to give Kubuntu a shot was that I used many KDE apps regularly, including Amarok. I’ve always found it sluggish in GNOME and thought maybe running it in its native KDE would help. It didn’t really. Even when I switched to a MySQL database instead of SQLite there was still choking and freezing.

One of the biggest surprises to me was that they keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + V in Amarok was overridden by Klipper, some sort of smart clipboard application. After a little tinkering, I was able to make it function in my preferred way, but the whole process just rubbed me the wrong way.

USB drive mount settings

Had I not been able to find a workaround for the following default behavoir, I would never consider using KDE again.

The setting for automounting USB drives when they are plugged into the machine automatically assigns "shortname=lower" to the drive. (I apologize for not having any clearer information or references, I’m writing this out of memory and don’t want to dig anything up.) This might only affect FAT32 filesystems, but that is what most USB flash drives are.

What this causes to happen is that one cannot create all UPPERCASE directory names on the drive. They are forced lowercase. Mixed case names are fine, it is only UPPERCASE that has a problem.

Well, I have a few directories that I want to be named in all uppercase, UCLA for example. The problem arose when I was using Unison, a file synchronization utility, between my hard disk and a flash drive. Through no fault of the program, my directories were being duplicated: one copy in all lowercase, and another copy in all uppercase, completely messing up my synchronization.

The only fix for this that I found was to call the GNOME automounter at startup so that it would recognize when I plugged in a USB drive and give it the right settings. I think when I did this though, it caused duplicate windows that presented options for the newly detected medium to appear instead of the normal single window.

So, in the end, after only a week of using Kubuntu I was longing for the simplicity of GNOME that I had grown used to without all the quirks that interrupted my daily routines. To be sure, there are still quite a few bumps in the road when using GNOME, but generally they do not seem to stop me in my tracks. Plus, we all appreciate familiarity, and that is what I’ve grown to have with GNOME on Ubuntu.

This seems to be the common knowledge among users as well. KDE and its native applications are more feature-packed than Gnome and its native applications, but therefore they are more complicated and not necessarily recommended for beginners.

Upon startup of my KDE session I was a bit wary because I had grown accustomed to the nice, clean, simple design of the default Gnome desktop in Ubuntu. I’m sure that wariness will fade in time.

More later, when I have had a chance to play around a bit.