One of my long-time peeves, Rhythmbox’s redundant notification icon bug was closed just last weekend, yay! Here’s to hoping that the last application still mis-using my notification area, Empathy, will see its corresponding issue also closed soon.
Pinning KNewsTicker down to bottom of screen with DevilsPie
This is on a 1280 × 1024 desktop, with the bottom panel remaining below (not behind) the ticker:
(if (is (window_name) "News Ticker") (begin (pin) (above) (undecorate) (skip_tasklist) (geometry "1280x20+0-0")))
The ‘xwininfo’ command is useful in getting the coordinates.
Note that this makes shutting the ticker down impossible, apart from issuing a ‘kill’ command to do it.
High CPU usage when doing anything with Nautilus
Nautilus began to manifest annoying sluggishness, which was the immediate result of it hogging up the CPU anywhere between 40 and 100 percent any time I did pretty much anything involving files or directories in the GUI. After covering some solution attempts which turned out to be dead ends, I created an extra user account for testing purposes and found that it was not susceptible to this issue.
Finally, I found a bug report on Launchpad with the “high cpu load” issue precisely described, and luckily with a fix included. I stripped my desktop directory (“Työpöytä” in my locale) from the variables defined in ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs (so that they referred to $HOME), replaced one symbolic link there with a genuine path, and then ran xdg-user-dirs-update && xdg-user-dirs-gtk-update before logging out and back in again. And now Nautilus is as nimble as ever.
Out of curiosity, I tried to reproduce the issue with my test user account: I inserted a symbolic link into one of the variables, as I suspected that was what triggered the sluggishness, but it turned out not to do so. So the exact cause still eludes me.