dstiles - 4:22 am on Mar 9, 2010 (gmt 0)

Ubuntu is what I installed and what I use. I've had to install a few KDE items to get what I want but mostly from the Add/Remove option. Kate isn't in that.

I did have a look at installing Kate over the weekend and remembered: It was one of several I looked into, some of which I installed and tried, but I didn't actually install Kate in the end as it was too much hassle to install, decided after reading several "I can't get it working" complaints in forums plus I just KNEW it was going to involve tracking down sudo install commands again with "uninstall this" comments amongst them. :(

You may well be right about Kate but I can't see it happening until I have a lot more time to play. In fact, taking your suggestion of not using KDE on ubuntu...

The suggestion about klipper: I'll look into that, if dev is still going on.

Not sure why I didn't try scribes - missed it in the melee, I guess. :( Now installed and I'll play with it as time permits. Kwrite sounds like another KDE one? It's not in the ubuntu list so see above under "Kate". :)

Quanta - I don't use many KDE apps - a couple of seldom-used PDF readers, kcron, kaffeine (which doesn't seem to work), a couple of "organizers", installed and never used in anger, knotes which is very useful, kommander which only lets me load txt files (probably me!), kalarm and smb4k. A few more but no idea why I (or other software) installed them.

Quanta is fine with small files. I'm currently working on 100k's worth with four other windows open on much smaller files. Last night it was taking my text at about a character per second. System Monitor showed the CPU maxing out (not a really fast machine but faster than my Windows ones) and it even showed high activity when it was sleeping - having nightmares, I suppose. :) Odd, because it came down from a high plateau and then oscillated to a stop over about a minute. It's not usually as bad as this even for large files; perhaps I was working too fast.

Best I've found so far for genealogy is GRAMPS, which is poor compared to what I'm used to but may be better than I think if used by someone who has never used such an app before and isn't set in their ways.

I have kexi installed and I played around with it as part of my probe into Access when I first installed ubuntu. Since I'm still complaining it probably didn't do what I wanted. :)

Thanks, graeme-p, for the advice and comments. Much appreciated. And to everyone else here. Very useful thread.