i´m running PCLinuxOS with KDE 4.x i suspect, i don't think we've gotten 5 yet. Anyway, it's a beautiful system and i like it a lot. i have a friend who has a laptop on which we have installed PCLinuxOS as well, but she wants at least one of her desktops to look like Win 8.1. i was thinking we could use KImageEditor, but discovered that it produces files for browsers - close but no prize.

It looks like there is Grid Desktop available which might work, if i could figure out how to reduce the number of grids and place the large, rectangular windoze icons inside the grid cells and then perhaps figure out how to make the icons run a program in another one of the desktops...

Am i close or should i go back to Google - lol.

Any help would be appreciated - i'd like to help her stay with Linux. Eventually i would hope to be able to wean her from this madness to using a regular, normal person's Menu, but in the meantime...

Have a great evening!

frazelle09 wrote:It looks like there is Grid Desktop available which might work, if i could figure out how to reduce the number of grids

When you move the mouse to one of the edges of the screen a bar will appaear with little + and - symbols on the ends that can be used to add or remove rows or columns from the grid. Use the bars at the top or bottom to add/remove rows, or the sides to add/remove columns.

frazelle09 wrote: and place the large, rectangular windoze icons inside the grid cells and then perhaps figure out how to make the icons run a program in another one of the desktops...

You can open up the application launcher -> navigate/search for the application you want -> right-click -> Add to Desktop, then move the icon to wherever in the grid that you want.

You may also try setting up a dashboard view with the grid of application launchers, or use a full-screen application launcher.

The dashboard is a separate view that you can launch via shortcut or using the Show Dashboard icon that you can add to the panel (if it isn't there already). I believe that by default it will just show the widgets on your current activity; but if you go to system settings -> Workspace Behavior -> Workspace, you can change it to show an independent widget set, which will always show the same set of widgets regardless of which desktop/activity you are on.

There are also a couple of full-screen application launchers that you can try out: Search and Launch and Homerun (may need to be installed separately). These launchers can be set up to replace the widgets on the desktop by selecting the corresponding entry from the Layout dropdown in the desktop settings. You can also add the Homerun launcher to the panel and it will open either full-screen (default) or as a standard launcher menu (alternate widget).

If none of that is satisfactory, find out what specifically is missing and we can see about recreating it here.

Good luck.