On your computer desktop, you often have multiple choices ON your menu, choices of recent documents to open, applications to open, system features to configure, or an option to shut down your machine or log out. Gnome, Mate, and many other desktops have a default menu built in. You can change the menu by installing alternative software. In the case of Mate and some other Gnome alternatives, the desktop comes with the “new and improved” sometimes called “advanced” menu that isn’t the default, and isn’t really an option … you have to fiddle to find out about it, mess around to make it install, then when you run it, you may run into trouble if it crashes. The version Mate supplies, in my experience over several years, crashes regularly.

The KDE Linux Desktop is a step above Buddy Hackett’s home life. Out of the box, you get three distinct options for what kind of menu you like. One of the main reasons people chose different desktops is how the desktop offers the user access to applications, documents, etc. In the old days, a multi-level menu was common. Then, the fancier menus were invented, sometimes called launchers, that would typically open with a list of favorites, or commonly used, software, and possibly recent documents, and a search function to find your things. Eventually, the full fledged dashboard, or “hud,” was invented. This is where the entire screen (or one monitor’s screen if you have multiple monitors), opens up with a bunch of icons and stuff. And, as noted, which of these approaches a given desktop environment was designed around often determined which desktop people liked to use.

Do not mistake this evolutionary scenario for an ordered list of betterness. All three methods have their benefits, and different people will prefer different methods.

You can have any of these three paradigms with pretty much any standard Linux desktop environment, but you will probably have to install, tweak, and mess with software that may not be reliable.

Or, you can use KDE and have all three paradigms as easily accessible, built in, well optimized, maintained options.

The KDE Application Menu looks like this:

You click on the dotty-looking thing on the lower left, and out pops the usual top level menu. There can be three levels in total. You get quick access to power-off or log out, recent applications or documents, and you can alternatively add recent contacts. Note that there is a search window.

The KDE Application Launcher looks like this:

Sorry, this may be a bit hard to see, but in real life it is totally readable. (Also, I think you can configure the transparency option of the various transparent things in KDE). This shows favorite software, which is configurable. Note that I’ve not configured mine, were I to do so it would have a very different list. Just start typing when this launcher is visible, and you are now searching for software. See those partly visible icons along the bottom? They are normally totally visible (my screen shot is imperfect). They are “favorite,” “application,” which is basically the multi-layered menu but a bit different, “Computer,” which is places, “history” and “Often used,” (not currently configured) as well as the non-removable button to shut down the computer. You can pick among these choices, have all, none, or a subset.

If you chose as your “menu” option the “Application Dashboard,” you get this:

This takes up the whole screen, and gives you this giant icon-rich borwsing for stuff experience. Note the menu-ish list on the right. and, you can search by just typing. This is a bit like the Ubuntu Unity dashboard.

Each of these items is very configurable. This is an example of the configuration menu for the Application Menu:

You chose which menu-launcher-thingie method you want to use by right clicking on the menu doohickie in the lower left and chosing “Alternatives.” Then you pick one and chose “switch.” Easy. Looks like this:

This is what is built in. You can do all sorts of other things to enhance your menu-application experience. I suggest you don’t. Stop fiddling with your computer and get to work. But the nice thing about KDE is that you have three highly configurable approaches to finding your applications and recent files, which are built in, maintained, and not broken. This separates KDE from most or possibly all of the other possible Linux desktops.

There are two other ways to get to your applications. One is to hit alt-F2 or the hot key or Krunner, which is a simple one line window that pops up. You can run apps from this, and do a lot of other things as well. The other is to put an icon for your commonly used software on the panel (menu bar, whatever you want to call it) which is probably along the bottom of your screen.

Me? I put the icons for the five or six most commonly used apps on the panel. I’m not sure if I want the application launcher or the multi-level menu to be the default, but I’ll only rarely use it. That makes me think I’ll go for the multi-level menu. When I use the menu to find an app, I’ll appreciate the organized traditional hierarchy to help me find it.

You can usually specify if you want network locations or storage devices shown as icons, or maybe a trash can, shown, but not much else. This is where Linux looks stupid compared to at least some earlier versions of Windows and the Mac, where you can do more with icons.

But in KDE, icons are very very configurable.

(See this post for a short diatribe on why you should try KDE even if you haven’t considered it lately … I myself am a recent convert to this particular desktop.)

In KDE, you can right click on the desktop, then chose “icons” on the context menu.

You can then arrange the icons horizontally or vertically on the screen.

You can align them to the left or right of the screen.

You can sort them by the usual sorting criteria.

You can specify sizes, ranging from “tiny” to “huge.”

And you can lock them. When unlocked, you can move them around.

The images shown here are exemplars of some of these options, in various combinations.

I never left Gnome, but Gnome left me. I won’t go into the details here, but as most Linux users know, Gnome 2.x was the high point of that particular world of Linux desktops (see THIS POST for definition of term “desktop”). With the demise of Good Gnome, mainly caused by Ubuntu (a distribution I otherwise have a great deal of respect for), I poked around among the various Gnome 2.0 desktop alternatives. Among them eventually emerged Mate, which at first, I thought was great. I used it as my main desktop for several years, until just recently.

But Mate had two major flaws. The first flaw was an attempt to simply everything. Mate never made an application to be part of its own desktop environment, but rather, it took old Gnome applications, then broke them slightly or failed to maintain them (but the Mate project developers did rename them all, to take credit for them, and add confusion). The second flaw was not fully maintaining the parts of the desktop environment it was responsible for, or fixing basic problems. For example, it has always been true that most people have a hard time grabbing window boundaries with their mouse in Mate. To fix this you have to go down into configuration files and manually change numbers. That is a bug that should have been fixed three years ago. I can only assume that the maintainers of Mate don’t have that problem on their particular desktops.

Among the main functions of a maintained desktop environment is keeping basic system configuration tools clean and neat and functional, but Mate messed that up from the beginning. I vaguely remember that an early version of Mate left off the screen saver software, so in order to have or use a screen saver, you had to install the old Gnome screensaver. The configuration and settings capacities of the Mate desktop are distributed across three or four different applications, at least one of which you have to find out about, find, install, and learn to use yourself, just to carry out simple functions. Basic categories of settings or configurations are distributed among these applications in a haphazard way. To do basic things like change the desktop appearance or mess with screen savers, etc, you have to be a power user.

But I thought Mate was still better than KDE partly because KDE was so strange. For one thing, single clicking in KDE was like double clicking everywhere else in the universe. Yes, you could reconfigure that, but it is still strange. The nature of the desktop, of panels, or widgets, of all of it, was just a little odd for me. Everything felt a little funny.

But over time, KDE did two things that Mate did not do. First, KDE continued to maintain, develop, improve, debug, make more efficient and powerful, all of its software. Instead of key software components going brain dead or not being maintained, or losing functionality like in Mate, KDE software got more powerful and more useful. At the same time, the software, and the overall desktop environment, got slicker, cleaner, more like the old Gnome 2.0 in many ways, and leaner, and less strange (single clicking is no longer a default!).

In the old days, it was probably true that Gnome used fewer of your computer’s resources than KDE. But the most current versions of Gnome and gnome like alternatives such as Mate probably use about 25% more resources than KDE out of the box. And, KDE out of the box is more configurable and overall more cool than Mate and many other desktops.

Here’s the key thing. When I first started using Linux, the feature I fell in love with was the workspace switcher, allowing one to maintain a number of virtual desktops, each with various things open on them. This is how I organize my work. It isn’t all that systematic, but in a given day, I’ll organically end up with all my stuff related to one project on one virtual desktop, and another project on a different virtual desktop. Gnome and gnome variants actually moved away from this standard. You can still have virtual desktops in current Gnome, but they are not there by default. Mate still has them by default, but I don’t trust Mate maintaners to maintain that.

But it is easily done in KDE, and with extra (mostly unnecessary) perks. In the KDE desktop environment, I can have the desktop background be different on my different virtual desktops on my desktop computer. Which sits on my desk. I can have other things be different on the different desktops. For me, this doesn’t do much because, as noted, my virtual workspaces evolve organically over time frames of hours or days. But someday, I may want a special desktop configured all special for some special purpose.

A couple of months ago, I had some problems with Mate. I uncovered an important and easily fixed bug. I told the maintainers about it. They told me to screw off. So I told them to screw off, and I started to explore other desktop environments. After realizing that they had been too rude to me, the Mate maintainers, to their credit, did fix the bug and tried to make nice. But I had already moved on. It did not take me long to get KDE up and running and configured as I like. And, I’ve hardly explored all the cool stuff it can do.

But I am exploring it now, and I’ll keep you posted.

See: KDE Icon Magic

The first bit of advice is this: Maybe don’t do this.

If you have multiple monitors on one or both of the two computers you would like to share, then you are probably taking up a lot of desk space. More to the point, the two dimensional, but really, one dimensional, range over which your monitors are spread is probably so wide that you can’t really use two computers with one keyboard and mouse without have some sort of super chair, a very long neck, and an extension build onto your arm. Maybe what you really need is two desks near each other with a computer on each one.

The USB fix.

But, maybe you still want to do this, to use two computers with one keyboard.

I want to do this in part because the only keyboards I really like are large and tend to cost close to $150, such as a full size Tactile Keyboard for a Mac, the Avant Stellar keyboard (which is very hard to find these days), or a cheaper Linux friendly Mechanical Feel Gaming Keyboard, such as this one which is on sale dirt cheap at the moment though I’ve not used this exact one so I’m not sure if it is any good. I like the big tactile keyboard sitting there with my favorite mouse, and I just want to sometimes use one computer, sometimes the other computer. I’m willing to shift the keyboard and mouse one way or the other by a foot or so on my desk, and I don’t change back and forth on the fly, just going to one computer for an extended period, then switching to the other computer for an extended period.

For this, you want a USB switcher such as the UGREEN USB Switch Selector. I use this one. You plug a USB mouse and a USB keyboard into it, and then run one USB cable to each of your two computers.

There is a button you press to switch computers. If you read the reviews you’ll see people complaining that the switch is not instantaneous. It isn’t, but for this particular use case it need not be. It is pretty fast. There are four USB inputs, so you can put more devices on the switch beyond just the keyboard and mouse, and if you do, that may slow down the switching more. Point is, this works fine for changing which computer you have keyed up, as it were, and it is not an expensive or difficult to implement alternative.

The Synergy Fix: Attempt one unhappy

There are multiple software solutions that allow two computers to use one mouse and keyboard by having one computer be the “server” and the other the “client,” so as your mouse moves from the screen of one computer to the other, both the keyboard-computer link and the mouse-computer link “seamlessly” changes.

I reviewed all the solutions for this and settled on Synergy by Symless. I then tried out version 1-point-something, which happened also to be on sale at the time, so I think it was less than $20. (Yes, this is not open source free software, but not everything is!)

I didn’t like that solution, and eventually uninstalled it. That is when I bought the USB switch. It was too slow. The performance of the mouse on the host computer was affected, and slowed down. So, as I moved the mouse across the screen, mouse-over events (when you move the mouse of a button or window or something) slowed down and sometimes stopped the mouse. Moving to the other computer was sometimes jumpy, sometimes didn’t work. Setup and re-setup when things went wrong was off. In order to make this work I actually had to keep a keyboard and mouse (in my case, bluetooth, small, and out of the way so no biggie) hooked up to the client computer in order to get that computer out of sleep mode, locked screensaver, or address issues on startup before the Synergy server-client thingie started working, or to fix the Synergy client server.

The advantage would have included the possibility of copy and past between computers, but in this version that was quirky and having that option on seemed to slow it down even more. (Note, your network may matter in how well this works, see below.)

The Synergy Fix: Attempt two pretty happy

But then Synergy 2.0 came out and it was good enough to prompt me to write it up and suggest you try it. Now, for me, I had already bought Synergy 1-point-something, so the upgrade on an extended black friday sale was $12. For you it will be closer to $50, but they guarantee satisfaction.

The upgrade and set up was not flawless or seamless but it did eventually work. I think I still need the second keyboard and mouse set up, but again, that is just a bluetooth setup stashed off to the side. If you are a multi-computer, multi-monitor level operator you have this hardware around anyway.

The mouse seems to behave perfectly normally and cut and paste between computers is fine. With the earlier version, the keyboard stalled unacceptably often when using Synergy and typing into a browser or editor or a text editor. I find all things that interfere with typing to be unacceptable because because I am a writer. Also, I can really notice the slowdowns or stuttering, again, because banging stuff out on the keyboard is what I do. I will not tolerate a software solution that messes with this.

Under the current system, the server computer (in this case a Linux computer) works flawlessly when typing. I see a small amount of hesitation every now and then on the client computer, a Mac, but this mac is slow and old, so I can’t be positive it is because of Synergy. The amount of slowdown is minimal.

At the moment, this means to me that I can use Synergy just fine, and I still have the USB switch noted above hooked up. So, I can change the keyboard via USB when I need to for extended typing.

Indeed, the last 134 words were typed in BBEdit over on the Mac, with acceptable performance, and in a moment I will copy it and paste it over to the post you are reading, being created in Chrome on the Linux computer.

Here we go.

There, that worked.

(Note, to use both a Linux or Windows computer AND a Mac, you will have to deal with some ctrl-alt-whatever keyboard issues, but I’m sure you can handle that.)

In short, I recommend all three of the above outlined solutions, in some sort of combination. Over time, one or two will settle out to be what you usually do. The main point is this: If you previously used Synergy version 1-point-whatever and were not happy, try Version 2, it is way, way better and actually quite nice.

One thing that might help any Synergy or similar system is to fix up your network better. Right now, both computers are communicating with a router via wireless. Never mind why, I know, it is not ideal. I intend to try to get a router in the same room and hook both computers to the built in switch, hooking that router out to the Internet via wireless. This will allow the Synergy system to be much more directly connected between the two computers, I assume.

In all the above I speak only of two computers and one set of keyboard and mouse. There is a lot more you can do than that, including multiple computers and multiple mouse-keyboard options. Since I’ve not tried any of that and don’t know exactly what is possible or what, if possible, is acceptable in terms of performance, I’ll remain silent on it.

If you have multiple computer use cases where you’ve tried stuff out, please let us know about your solutions and problems in the comments!

Installing Copy on Linux was pretty easy. You go to the web page, download a tarball, upack it, then inside the tarball figure out the folder that matches your OS (i.e., 32 vs 64 bit) and go into that folder. Then run the Agent. That may, if you are good, put a thingie on your notification area. Click on that and then sign in and install and stuff, that’s it.

There are two pages you might find useful, one for Ubuntu the other for Copy more generally if needed.

Notably, the install on Linux was easier for Copy than for Dropbox. Dropbox install LOOKS easy but never goes as planned, in my (extensive) experience with it.

Copy is a new cloud storage service that may be a serious competitor to Drobbox. I just installed it and I like it.

Dropbox gives 2 Gigabytes for free, 100 Gigabytes for 9.99 a month, 200 Gigabytes for 19.99 a month, and 500 Gigabytes for 49.99 a month.

Copy gives 15 Gigabytes for free, 250 Gigabytes for $10.00 a month, and 500 Gigabytes for 15.00 a month (cheaper if you pay by the year).

I know for a fact that Dropbox works well with Linux and Mac and I assume Windows. Copy claims to be compatible and well integrated with all of these system. I’ve not thoroughly tested Copy yet, but they do seem to work differently.

To make Copy work on my Mac, I installed the app from the menu by downloading the image file and doing the drag and drop thingie. I then ran the application and after a few short steps I had a new folder on my computer called “Copy.” It was place within my home directory, though I had the option of using a different folder. The installation program conveniently (or obnoxiously depending on how well you keep your lawn trimmed) placed a short cut on the shortcut bar in “finder.”

At a couple of times during the process of signing up and installing I was given the option to just move everything from my computer, or from “another cloud storage device” to Copy, which I chose not to do because that would have certainly involved upgrading to a paid account; I wanted to try this out with the free storage first, though I’m not adverse to buying storage if I need it, especially at rates so much lower than Dropbox.

The first thing I did was to attempt to drag and drop a folder that has several files in it into Copy. The folder held a handful of subdirectories, several hundred files, and was in all about 1.2 gigabytes in size. Within a few seconds upload started. Seemed to be about on par with Dropbox, but I did not take any measurements for comparison. Copy allows local syncing, which of course I’ve not tested yet.

It is difficult to recommend for or against Copy until it has been out a while longer, but at the moment it seems to be essentially the same as Dropbox but cheaper. Will Dropbox lower its price? Will Copy be amazing like Dropbox is? Will this work just as well on my Linux machine?

Tune in next week for another installment of …. “Copy vs. Drobox”

UPDATE: I’ve installed the iPad app. Installed cleanly, much crisper, easier to use, better laid out than Dropbox, a total win. And it functions fine.

Tomorrow PM I plan to install Copy on my Linux laptop. Later in the week, on the Linux workstation.