Linux switchers' remorse

Faced with a choice between a C$1,750 G4 iBook and an $800 T30 ThinkPad with similar specs, I opted for the ThinkPad. After twenty years of Apple computing, I knew I wouldn't be able to live with Windows, but KDE seemed an attractive option.

So I installed Simply MEPIS 3.3.2 test 03 and just about everything worked right away: wireless card, USB mouse, trackpoint.... The TouchPad, however, was hypersensitive, and tapping was enabled, making it useless because each time it was touched it acted like a mouse device. I went to the Control Center and disabled tapping. I restarted KDE. Great! Touchpad worked normally. But no more USB mouse or trackpoint. Numerous requests around IRC and Linux forums have yielded no solution. Also, no one has any idea on how to enable the IBM feature that Windows offers, which is to hold the middle button while using the trackpoint to scroll up and down pages.

My next challenge was to try to enable hibernation and suspend. I'm almost there so there's hope for this one, but anyone interested in my trials and willing to offer advice can read all about it here:

The real whopper, however, is something that seems so simple, so obvious, that you have to wonder how the developers at KDE--now in version 3.3--have yet to address it.

As a professional text tweaker, my primary use for a computer is English composition. Thus I have frequent need of the special characters that came so easily under OS X, and somewhat less easily under Windows. For example, on OS X, hitting Shift+Option+Hyphen creates an em dash (UTF 2014). Under Windows, the shortcut is Alt+0151. power at the keyboard, rather than the mouse--I'm obliged to stop typing and to play with a GUI program called KCharSelect every time I want an em dash, an accented vowel, a British Pound, Japanese Yen, or Euro sign, etc. I would very much like to modify the US keyboard layout so as to create shortcuts that are comparable to what I enjoyed on OS X, but am told that there is no easy way to do so. Once I heard that it was possible under KHotKeys, but after wasting an hour of my life trying to figure it out without success, I'm told that it's not possible there after all. Apparently what I must do is successfully edit the gibberish inetc-X11-xkb-symbols-pc-us, but no one has offered specific help doing so. (Creating special character shortcuts in Open Office isn't enough; I use special characters in other programs--Firefox, GAIM, etc.--too. The shortcuts have to be good for all of KDE.)

The last issue might seem trivial, but OS X's keyboard shortcuts were a key reason for my championing it over Windows. But even XP has keyboard shortcuts to special characters; KDE, it seems, does not, and there is no easy way to implement them.

If it must be the hard way--editing the config file--so be it, but without my keyboard shortcuts, I'm a dissatisfied, disgruntled, Linux user--and certainly no advocate--who thinks the extra C$950+tx for the iBook would've been worth it.