Floating Goats

For some stupid reason, I made a statement that starting April 1 (beginning of the fiscal year in Japan) I'd switch to an OS X desktop for a month.

I've been kind of disillusioned with most of the unix desktops available. KDE is horribly bloated and I've never been able to get a number of features to work properly on a custom compile (printing mainly), Gnome has a lot of the same bloat that KDE suffers from, and Enlightenment is basically eyecandy to the max. XFce is about the only thing that does what I need - provide multiple desktops, launch applications and for the most part stay out of the way.

I say I actually started today, but friday after moving desks (another traditional thing to do at the start of the year at a japanese company) I did some research on the basic software I needed. I already had an Intel based MacOSX machine prepared and loaded with Firefox and Thunderbird, so those basics were covered. Next thing I needed was an IRC client - iChat wasn't going to do. One Google search later I was onto Ircle, which seemed to have a reasonably well-regarded Mac IRC client available, and a universal binary (PPC and i386 rolled into one) was available.

By this time I really felt like a fish out of water in terms of navigation. I needed multiple desktops. This is something that's coming as "Spaces" in the next point release of OS X, but I needed it now. You Software has a shareware package called You Control Desktops that did the trick and features mind candy like the cube twisting desktop change animation included in Fedora Core 6.

So now I have the basic functionality covered, but I have a lot of tweaks to make in order to make myself more productive.