Though I'm a longtime Xfce user on the Linux desktop (and a longtime user of Fedora as my distribution), I'm open to other things.

As I've written many times, I want to like GNOME 3. Fedora Workstation is based on it. But it just doesn't work for me. I don't want to say GNOME 3 is unpolished, but it's just too stripped down until you start shoving GNOME Shell Extensions onto your system.

Plus, GNOME 3 doesn't play well at all with the Citrix applications that I've been using for the past couple of years and will continue using for maybe the next six months.

And GNOME 3 just doesn't "feel right." And "feel" is something I don't want to ignore.

On what I suppose is a bit of a whim (or maybe I did it by accident, I can't remember), I logged in to the Plasma desktop. I don't know if calling their desktop "Plasma" short-changes the KDE brand, or if that matters at all, but I had a poor grasp of what Plasma is in relation to KDE.

It turns out I like Plasma (or KDE, or whatever it's called).

The desktop works well, is faster than you'd think and has quite a bit of polish. There are lots of configuration options, and they are all built in. It's not like the comparative tragedy of the GNOME Tweak Tool and gconf.

And I am growing very dependent on the Dolphin file manager.

Things I like about Dolphin:

• Split mode. Nautilus used to have it. Thunar never did. It's like having windows in a car that actually open. That's a bad analogy, but the ability to easily transfer files from one directory to another without opening two file manager windows is so fundamental that I wonder why every file manager doesn't have it.

• Faster transfer to USB flash drives. Is it my imagination, or is Dolphin configured to speed up the copying of files to USB flash drives. Those operations are notoriously slow when done on my Fedora system in other file managers. I know there are ways to speed up those transfers, but I'm too lazy to figure them out. I'm happy to have Dolphin do that for me. I'm pretty sure I got this wrong. The file transfers go at the same speed in pretty much all the file managers.

• Configuration, configuration, configuration. KDE has always been about configuration of all the things. And GNOME has been not-so-slowly offering a stripped-down, hard-to-configure experience that is low on included tools. Xfce is very configurable, KDE/Plasma even more so. The file manager is such an important part of any system, it's vital that you are able to do what you want with it.

From the "feel" perspective, as I say above, KDE's Plasma desktop is much faster than billed. The animations don't distract. It seems relatively easy on the CPU. I installed the overly complicated digiKam, which I have used in the past because it's one of a very few Linux applications that allows editing of the IPTC metadata in JPG images that the media industry uses pretty much universally. While still complicated as hell, digiKam passes the IPTC test.

I have had problems with the KDE Wallet system "eating" my Google Chrome browser cookies, and that's something I'm not terribly happy with. I lost all of my stored passwords at one point. Firefox definitely "plays" better with KDE/Plasma.

And right now I'm having issues configuring the touchpad with the KDE-supplied utility, though that's today. It worked a few days ago. GNOME is really bad at this -- as is LXDE, one of the many DEs I've sampled in the past couple of weeks.

I can't say that I will move from Xfce to KDE/Plasma because I probably won't. But I can certainly see using the Plasma Desktop as my part-time environment, with Xfce still doing the heavy lifting for my media production and software development needs.

But you never know.

I have a bunch of files in a directory, and I want to delete all that begin their filename with the letters X16 (e.g. X16data.xml)

I used Dir.glob to select the files and iterated over what comes up in the pattern, using File.delete to get rid of what I don't want (Thanks, Stack Overflow):

Dir.glob("X16*") do |file|
 File.delete(file)
end

You can put any kind of regex in here, and it'll probably work. That's the theory anyway.

On my current project, I am trying to use using rubyzip to unzip an archive.

So far it's not working, and I'll probably shell out to Bash and Linux/Unix's unzip to get it done.

I figured it out. Now I have to manage the unzipped files (deleting the unused, renaming the good, then deleting the good at the beginning of the run) and account for NOT running the program if there is no file on the other end.

Can you call a business a "web site" if they try to force you to use an app to access their content on a mobile device?

I guess everything these days is a "social network," "e-commerce platform," "content provider," or some other phrase or three that escape me at this particular moment.

There are two social networks -- one is an employment-based network, the other a dining-reviews network -- that won't let me see content at various times without downloading their mobile application.

Bet you can guess who I'm talking about.

The first is LinkedIn. I don't remember having much trouble accessing LinkedIn on my phone or tablet, but I get these emails from them that say, "So and So has an update." I click for the update, and it sends me to a come-on for the LinkedIn app.

I'm not getting that app. So I don't get the content.

The other one -- the dining-review app -- is worse.

That's Yelp, in case you didn't figure it out.

Every time you go to their site on a phone or tablet, the top of the page is a massive plea to download and run their app.

And then the web site wastes no time in telling you that you'll only get a few dining reviews from real people in the browser. If you want more, you'll have to get the app.

I don't want the app. So I lose out on your content -- and any ad impressions you might be offering to monetize my experience.

Why don't I want these two apps?

1) Not everybody has a 128GB iPhone. My el-cheapo Android phone is limping along with 8GB of storage, and that is double my previous phone's 4GB. Even though I have a 32GB SD card on board, there's only so much that can go on it in terms of apps (thanks for that, Android). Some apps won't go on the SD card, and most store data on the phone's memory regardless of where they are installed. So I have to be very selective in what I do have on the phone.

2) I don't need an app for a site or service I use infrequently. It's just clutter, and I'd rather use the browser. Even if I had a 64GB phone, I don't want a dozen pages of apps to swipe through.

3) Your app is not that good. Most apps don't do more than mimic a browser-delivered web experience. Maybe some users feel "safer" using an app rather than a web site. Those days are gone. Web apps (really just fancy web sites with lots of Javascript) do so much client-side that they really are apps that users don't have to download and keep on their phones.

The craziest one these days is Amazon.

Amazon will pay you $5 just to use their app.

Why?

Because, for Android anyway, their app is not in the Google Play store, and you have to download it and allow your phone to run non-Play Store apps.

Most users find this daunting and don't want to do it. But maybe $5 will change their minds.

I just discovered that the Amazon is preloaded on my Android phone, so maybe if I launch it I'll get the $5? Probably not.

But do I even need this app? It will alert me if crap I want to buy is available, on sale, or who knows what.

I use Amazon enough that maybe the app is worth it.

But most of the apps out there for things that can be taken care of with a web site? No, I don't want your app. I don't have room on the phone for it.

I sort of understand that you feel you need an app. That it's part of your business plan. But at least give me a choice. If you push to hard on making me download and run your app just to sample your service, chances are I never will. And you lose a potential customer. Or hundreds (or thousands) of them.

Since the OpenShot video editor is pretty much broken in version 2.0.x, and I'm using a Fedora 22 package of version 1.4.3 so I can keep editing video while I contemplate learning KDEnlive.

I installed the OpenShot 1.4.3 package, and in my next run of the yumex-dnf package manager, it cheerfully offered to upgrade to 2.0.7.

No.

So how do you keep yumex-dnf and regular ol' dnf from bugging you about this every time?

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Just like on the laptop before this one, if you bang on it and take it enough places, you end up with a busted key.

Where do you get a new one?

HP won't sell you one key.

Enter third-party individual-key sellers like ReplacementLaptopKeys.com, which attempt -- usually very well -- to send you any individual key to replace a broken one.

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I hadn't edited a video in a long time, and when I opened the OpenShot video editor in Fedora 24 yesterday, I found a completely updated user interface in version 2.0.7 that made the app harder to use. I could barely see the tracks at the bottom, and there appeared to be no way to make that window big enough to remedy the problem.

I could no longer change the "properties" of an item and modify the time it occupied on the video.

It wasn't recognizing linefeeds on my Inkscape-generated titles.

And then it crashed all the time.

In short, a decent, workhorse app has become totally useless.

I then tried to edit some audio. Again, I haven't done it in awhile. Audacity is very stable, so how could there be a problem?

There was. The play/pause buttons kept disappearing, as did the icons for switching modes. I was able to do a quick audio edit, but it was neither easy nor pleasant.

I think the OpenShot issues are systematic to the project and its one-man-band development situation. (I know -- I really should figure out KDEnlive and be done with it.)

Audacity's problem lies elsewhere in the system, as this Fedora bug report details.

I have a test Ubuntu 16.04 system on another drive. I loaded it up and installed Audacity (same version, 2.1.2). It worked perfectly.

I installed OpenShot, which RPM Fusion distributes for Fedora users in version 2.0.7). Ubuntu provides version 1.4.3. Which is old. But it works.

So I'm wondering if I should just make the leap and dump Fedora 24 for Ubuntu 16.04. It would do wonders for my video- and audio-editing productivity, for one thing.

And I thought that Ubuntu's HUD (heads-up display) was roughly equal to what GNOME 3 offers in its "hot corner" search. Nope. In GNOME, you can search for applications but not files. Ubuntu's HUD allows you to find applications and files. This is no deal-breaker because you can search for files in the Nautilus/Files file manager in both Ubuntu's Unity and any system running GNOME. Still, the HUD (love or hate what it CAN search for) is better than anything else out there for Linux.

So will I do it? I hate replacing systems and moving my files over. But I'm thinking.

Cormen's "Introduction to Algorithms" (aka CLRS) looks hard. People who understand the material say the math involved is trivial, but I'm not anywhere near there.

So how do you get comfortable with the math before tackling CLRS itself?

A writer on Quora suggests reading a free textbook from an MIT open course called "Mathematics for Computer Science."

Others suggest that the appendix in CLRS serves as a guide to the mathematics needed to understand the rest of the book.

Another Quora writer recommends algorithm books by Sedgewick and Dasgupta (the latter available for free) as alternatives to CLRS.