I don’t use KDE. I don’t use Gnome either, really, although I’ll admit that I do have it installed right now on the Thinkpad, and it’s doing an admirable job. But both DEs are just too much for me on a regular basis, and so I usually only refer to Gnome as a kind of offhand benchmark for system performance, and KDE as a similarly casual benchmark for aesthetics. If someone can come up with a Gnome desktop that looks as good as most of the KDE ones I see, I’ll acknowledge that it does have an artistic side.

But as far as I’m concerned, both pale when you put them up against the KDEmod packages for Arch. If I wasn’t such an incorrigible Openbox addict, I would definitely be using KDEmod. And if you’re an Arch user and you haven’t at least tried it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. I know you dig dvtm or whatever, but at least give it a try. It’s at once exceedingly minimal, lightning fast and pretty as a peach.

I do, however, see where the idea of KDEmod as the standard Arch version doesn’t really do it. I don’t have the least bit of experience or ability in packaging or distro management, but I get that spider-sense tingling that says you can’t really keep KDEmod as the default KDE for Arch. It just has to be an alternative, something that requires a certain sense of aesthetics, minimalism and performance to be appealing.

I don’t really have any rationale for that opinion, other than acknowledging that a default KDE should be KDE. A KDE-savvy Arch user will probably migrate toward KDEmod anyway, provided that they find the entire principle acceptable, but an ordinary Arch user or a KDE veteran might expect the full rendition, and that, to me, is what should be there at the start.

You know, all this talk about KDEmod makes me want to install it again. Where’s my dban disk at … ?