Your Desktop

Learn how to use Linux with your KDE desktop. It is a graphical desktop, designed to be simple, easy to use, visually attractive and powerful. While you are getting familiar with Linux, using KDE, work on getting your local development environment set up.

Kontact is your personal information management and communications center. If it isn’t already installed, get it installed and configured the way you like it. Get in the habit of using it for checking your email. Use the Calendar to help you manage your schedule and Contacts to manage your contacts. You can also keep a journal if you want to. You can create notes with Kontact and you can check the news you are interested in, with the feeds module.

Get familiar with the KDE database management application, Kexi, and use it together with Kontact to manage your database of contacts and appointments. PostgreSQL is my favorite database software, even though I don’t really know very much about databases. I say that because of reading the documentation. MySQL is way more common and popular, but PostgreSQL is more advanced.

Falkon is KDE’s web browser. It is relatively new and simple. I just set it as my default browser (9/6/22) and I’ll see how well it works and report the results from now on.

I wish I could recommend using the Calligra suite of office productivity tools. I don’t know about the others, but the Calligra writing application is practically unusable. Maybe you can get it configured to work right, but I have been unable to change the default font and other problems and that is just not acceptable. Hopefully, KDE will get that problem solved soon.

I do recommend LibreOffice or OpenOffice. OpenOffice is the old style from the BSD, SunMicrosystems branch of Linux. Usually, it is not in the Linux distribution repository, so you have to install it manually. Once installed, it is rock sold and works great. OpenOffice is currently maintained by the Apache Foundation.

LibreOffice is the replacement that was forked from OpenOffice when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and most of the Linux users ran away from the giant mega-corporation. Libreoffice is very actively developed. Has all the latest gizmos and bells and whistles. It looks and works great and after using Openoffice for a years or so, I’m settling on Libreoffice, for now, 2024.

Get texlive-full and Kile installed and configured. Do your research. Learn how to use this powerful tool to write professional articles, books and scientific documentation. There is a learning curve for using Latex. It was originally invented to enable scientists to write mathematical formulas, graphs and chemical diagrams and things like that. It is well worth the effort to learn how to use this professional typesetting technology. It is relatively easy to write stories in Latex. You can learn how to write the more sophisticated formulas and diagrams later, as you get more and more familiar with the application.

Kate is probably already installed. You can use it to write notes and articles for your websites. You can also open a shell within Kate and use it as a powerful, fully featured code editor. By default the editor is in the middle on the right, just below the tool bar, the terminal opens below the editor and you can toggle a directory tree open and closed in a column on the left.

Use Kile and Kate a lot. Get familiar with both of them. There will be a learning curve that slows you down at first, especially with Kile, but then, you will become a high performance professional content creator and code editor. Code is the language that your computer understands. LaTeX is a code that enables you to write mathematical formulas and lists and graphs and all that in your content.

Learn how to code in order to program your computer’s operating system and the applications that run on the operating system. The operating system and the applications are all programmable. You can use Kate to program them. Use Kile to create all kinds of professional quality content. Content is output. It can be in the form of printed material, like books or articles, or website or social media content.

I used KDE’s Konsole terminal emulator for years and it is a great programmable terminal. However, a few years ago Alacritty and Kitty came out running in the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) rather than the Central Processing Unit (CPU). They are way faster than Konsole, noticably so, even for me, and I do not do all that much work in the terminal. I am more of a writer and content creator than a computer programmer.

My latest terminal emulator is Wezterm. I just installed it on my new setup and I don’t know anything about it. It seems like a GPU based terminal 2.0.

Try them all. Learn how to use your terminal, ZSH, Git and SSL. Kitty has multiplexing built into it. Alacritty is the do it yourself model. You can use Tmux with Alacritty for multiplexing. Multiplexing enables you to divide the screen into multiple panels and have multiple sessions and/or tabs that you can switch back and forth between. Multiplexing is built into Kitty, so there is no need for Tmux.

Installing Zsh is one of the first things I do when installing Linux. I recommend that you do the same. And then, switch your default shell from Bash to Zsh. Zsh is a more advanced shell that does everything Bash does, with a few additional features and capabilities. Zsh may be slightly slower than Bash, but the extra features are worth that cost. .2 seconds is not that much different than .3 seconds, but it could add up when running very large programs.

Git is your collaboration tool. It enables you to keep a record of your changes, so you can go back to an earlier stage in your development work if you want to. It also enables you to collaborate with other software engineers. Several people can work on the same project, without interfering with each other.

Secure Shell (SSH) enables you to login to remote servers, so you can securely login to and work on your website, even though it is hosted on a computer far away from the computer you are working on. Using Git and SSH, you can work on a copy of your website, located on your computer, and then push the changes to your live website whenever you are ready. tcl and tls are recent additions that turn SSH into SSL for more advanced secure communications.

Investigate C, C++, Rust, Lua, Qml and PostgreSQL. Get them installed and properly configured on your computer. Take your time. Do one at a time. Then, use Git and SSL to check out the Github repository for Kontact, Calligra, Falcon, and Kate, etc. Work on improving the applications, individually and collectively. Work on getting Falcon, Kate and KDE Connect integrated into Kontact. Make sure that Calligra and Kontact work well with each other. Have fun developing a complicated puzzle.

I’ve recently had Pop!_OS and Ghost BSD installed on my main desktop computer. So, for 2025, I’ll be using them and exploring the GTK applications and how they all work together, and writing and telling stories about them.