I used to use some gDesklets, but there are so many nice Screenlets now that I’ve switched entirely to those. Even after all these years, I’m still impressed that an entire operating system–and one that can be configured to look like almost anything–is absolutely free. I was first hit by that when I got a copy of Mandrake something-or-other. All I’d ever used was Windows (well, Mac OS9 for a while), and when I first booted Mandrake into the default KDE desktop, I distinctly recall thinking, “Holy shit…people made this and just gave it away for anyone to use for free!” Back then, Linux could be decidedly un-user-friendly (and often was), but KDE was kind of pretty, and I was so amazed that I could not only make that look the way I wanted, but I could have other DEs as well, all without reinstalling or removing anything at all. I switched to Gnome when Ubuntu first came out because I liked the “cleaner” look, and in spite of what devout KDE users say, it’s not that hard to find settings that you want to change, but even now, I’d still use KDE if it was that or Windows. When I do really need Photoshop and have to run Windows, I keep looking on the right of the screen for stuff like CPU usage, GPU temp and new mail, but it’s not there. I’m sure there are apps you can buy that will do it, and Vista might do it natively (don’t know, don’t care), but only Linux does it for free. If I want to change the look of Windows beyond a few choices that MS made for me, then I have to buy something to do that, and use up my system resources to run it on top of the OS. All of my Linux stuff is free–there is not one single piece of software installed on my machine that isn’t at least free as in beer, and most are both free as in beer and free as in speech. I think that’s pretty goddamned awesome; maybe there is some hope for our culture of greed and power worship after all. Maybe. 🙂

Edit: Oh, and for when I forget (again), the way to make minimised-to-panel Rhythmbox stop popping up the artist/title/album every time it plays a new song is right click the icon and uncheck “Show notifications”. It’ll still show on mouseover.