Guilt to the Seventh Degree

So my new laptop did, as prophesied, arrive last week (though on Friday; original estimate was Thursday).

It’s… nice. Significantly smaller than its predecessor, with less (and different) bells and whistles- this one has a webcam, for example, but no HDMI or S-Video output.

It also has Windows 7. I feel guilty saying it, but… I’m really enjoying Windows 7. I have yet to get (cross the fingers) any blue screens of death. It is reasonably, though not extraordinarily, quick. I quite like the new taskbar design.

Now, what do I miss? About eight trillion customization options from KDE; tabbed file manager; being able to roll my mousewheel over the volume icon on the taskbar to get the volume changed. I also miss the Always Above Others force-toggle for windows, the smart scroll focus (the mousewheel scrolls whatever window you’re hovered over without changing the focused window) and, of course, Kate and Amarok. I do not miss Wine with all its glitches and incompatibilities. I was making the switch from Firefox to Chrome before the crash, so that’s just been accelerated. Kaffeine, though I miss it, has a decent-if-not-extraordinary replacement in VLC Media Player. Pidgin is cross-platform to begin with. I guess I could track down EditPlus 2, which is what I used to use for text editing pre-Linux.

I can’t find a replacement for Amarok, though. No matter how shiny Win7 is (and it is); no matter how convenient… iTunes is bad for iPod and music library management compared to Amarok 1.4. It may do many of the things Amarok does (I’m still looking into it) but… I liked Amarok.

Pike is probably either aghast at this betrayal or laughing at me. Either way… don’t look at me like that! I might still dual boot! Aw, c’mon…