I like to keep my software up-to-date, so I sync it with the repos­i­tory every day, and see if there’s anything that needs updating.

And yet, I don’t like the fact that it takes time to perform the update, or that there is a chance that my stable system could be broken by the change, or that a package may fail to build.

So I run the update command, hoping that there’s nothing new.

The title of this post was supposed to be “I Have A Macbook Pro Now”, but this one seemed just as appro­priate. I am one of those guys who watches in disdain as others argue about “being a PC” or “being a Mac” (it’s Linux all the way for me, baby) but then I figured one must try every­thing in life. Yeah, I know I’m twisting a perfectly legit­i­mate philos­ophy for the sake of personal gain, but this is my blog after all. Live with it.

Even the village idiot would have figured out by now that I’ve purchased a new Macbook Pro. I haven’t used a Mac before, except on rare occasions, so I’m still learning. That being said, there isn’t much to learn, apart from keyboard short­cuts. This operating system is Unix-y enough for me to feel comfort­able — for example, I copied over my zshrc file from my desktop to the laptop, and voila! I have a terminal that behaves exactly like the one on my good ol’ Gentoo box.

One of the disad­van­tages of being a Mac user though, is that almost every silly piece of software costs $20 or more. This is slightly mitigated by the fact that almost every­thing comes out of the box, except for Office software (no problem though, grab a copy of OpenOffice.org before they run out of copies). But I guess that’s a totally different world, where software is free (as in speech).…

The wait is finally over. KDE 4.1 is now in the official portage repos­i­tory, which means that Gentoo users can upgrade to it without having to unmask any packages or setting up an overlay.

I upgraded to the new and shiny KDE 4.1 today for the first time. I could have easily gotten it from an overlay a long time ago, but then I figured it was best to wait for it to mature. Like its prede­cessor (KDE 3.5), this version of KDE looks quite unpol­ished until you spend some time customizing it. For instance, I cannot fathom the reasons behind not enabling font anti-aliasing by default. Without this tweak, all fonts look jagged and ugly. KDE also seems to have taken the path of Microsoft’s Windows Vista in terms of its color scheme: gray and black seem to be the norm.

Overall, I am not too disap­pointed with the upgrade, but I realize now that I’m going to have to wait for future releases for many pieces of function­ality that I used to love in KDE. This is one of the downsides of having software redesigned from scratch. For instance, Amarok 2 (still in beta) included in this version of KDE, is missing several key features, such as track-queuing and equal­izer support. I just wish the KDE devel­opers had focused on having a 4.1 release that was on par with 3.5.10 in terms of features, rather than worry about the details.