A computer update: the file selection dialog boxes on my machine, as well as quite a few programs, rely on GTK+3 widgets, but my desktop is really MATE (using GTK+2), and the generic theme that the GTK+3 stuff gets rendered in was just plain ugly, so I added an upgrade to the Cinnamon desktop, and have been playing with that for a bit. My thoughts so far:
- Cinnamon seems faster, and seems to also use less computing power.
- It (Cinnamon) seems less complete, and more buggy, than MATE.
- It has some clean looks, but it is really plain, and all my favorite little pieces of eye candy are gone.
I tried going back to the MATE desktop, but I found that even though I enjoyed having my toys back, the ugly GTK+3 programs really were too much, and so I’m trying to get used to my new plain-Jane desktop. (I should look into installing a MATE theme that works for both GTK+2 and 3. Then I could go home again.)
One motivation for changing desktops was that I was planning to use Eclipse as an IDE for Python, which meant that I had to start using Eclipse, one of the ugly programs under MATE. I also upgraded to the latest Eclipse, and installed Java 8, the latest Java runtime environment, and added the PyDev IDE plugin. OK, all of that went well, though I did things in a slightly nonstandard fashion, and I now have an up-to-date Eclipse IDE with Python, as well as C/C++ and Javascript installed.
But in the meantime… The next time I fired up the Java Open Street Map editor (after installing the new Java), JOSM just puked a bunch of error messages. No idea what went wrong, but I was launching it with the old Java Runtime Environment, and I thought that maybe there was an interference with the new environment I installed. So, I tried launching it with the new JRE, and it came up just fine, along with a message that, at long last, it too had been upgraded to the new Java 8, purely by coincidence but at the same time as my own fiddling.
Anyway, all is well again, if slightly dull, in my computer land.
