GNOME 3 and KDE 4 were craptastic enough to drive me away. I hope there is a particularly ultra-hot spot in hell for Miguel de Icaza.
Don't know about GNUstep, but back in the day, I used to like, I think it was called WindowMaker. Which had a NeXT-like "dock", and probably a MacOS-like skin/theme that I never used.
That never had a file manager/desktop shell, I think, so it was pretty primitive.
2019-10-21 11:30 from IGnatius T Foobar
The current crop of "mainstream" Linux desktops are crap. They're all
aping Apple in unusability. I just want a simple program menu and then
GET OUT OF THE WAY.
GNOME 3 and KDE 4 were craptastic enough to drive me away. I hope
there is a particularly ultra-hot spot in hell for Miguel de Icaza.
I agree with this sentiment up to a point.
Nowadays I install XFCE on computers that need a desktop environment, which is usually workstations for other people. I use DWM on my laptops and fluxbox on my workstations. I don't think any of these are "crap" but they are certainly not for the n00bs.
Damned if I know why xfce conssistently F's up in a virtualbox environment. Might have something to do with drag and drop integration? I haven't bothered to troubleshoot fully. Just get the crap out of there.
I've been using LXDE just for the minimalism and low resource usage, and it seems to run fine inside VirtualBox.
What I'd really like to have is a bare metal hypervisor for the desktop, but there doesn't seem to be a market for that. I would even be ok with having to hotkey between full screens/
There is even a clipboard for cut&paste between contexts if you need that. Plus Windows 7 integrates transparently too.
It's interesting to see that E was once the desktop that had the most interesting eye candy to show off, but now that eye candy is overdone in pretty much every desktop, E now goes for simplicity.
I remember when E first came out. It was a little pokey on the hardware of the day, and I think it looked a little, uhh, gooey. Too much business in the window borders, as I recall.
Mon Oct 21 2019 11:40:47 AM EDT from LoanShark @ Uncensored
Don't know about GNUstep, but back in the day, I used to like, I think it was called WindowMaker. Which had a NeXT-like "dock", and probably a MacOS-like skin/theme that I never used.
I switched the window manager on my workstation (OK, "desktop") from Afterstep to WindowMaker almost 20 years ago have continued using WM across several system migration/upgrades.
But, on my new (to me) laptop I'm using Xmonad for the complete lack of decorations.
So here's the thing that bugs me about Xmonad and other tiling window managers. Look for screenshots on the web and all you see is people tiling a bunch of terminal windows.
If what you wanted was the modern equivalent of DESQview, wouldn't it be easier to just build tiling into your terminal program? (Yes, I know about Terminator, it does exactly that and it's pretty cool.)
I don't see a lot of people using tiling window managers when they actually have a lot of GUI programs running.
That having been said, I still might give it a try. Now that I have an ultrawide monitor, I find that I've been manually tiling anyway, arranging the windows so that everything is sized and shaped so that nothing is offscreen...
I don't see a lot of people using tiling window managers when they
actually have a lot of GUI programs running.
I do use tiling window managers with lots of GUI programs running.
Often times a browser, a file manager and a terminal in a tab, then email and other browser and some encryption tool in another tab(s).
I actually use different browsers for different contexts, so no tabbing mind you.
I did intend to try out a tiling window manager, but I haven't gotten around to that yet. What I did do, was to start with the latest Kubuntu, since my very favorite video editor (on any platform) is Kdenlive, which is of course native to KDE.
OMFG.
The latest KDE *looks like a desktop*. There is a bar on the bottom of the screen. On the left of the bar is the launcher menu, each open window has a button in the bar, on the right of the bar is the tray, AND THERE IS NOTHING ELSE.
Nothing. Nothing on the top of the screen. No "activities" tray. No "stuff" box. Nothing but the damn desktop. FINALLY someone is returning to an out-of-the-box configuration that looks like a f***ing COMPUTER. It isn't trying to be a phone.
It isn't trying to be a tablet. It isn't trying to be a hybrid interface that's optimized for a refrigerator instead of your desktop.
This is all I really want.
But yes, it is a bit resource hungry. There is some noticeable lag on my low-end computer. And I make no apology on their behalf for that. I'm just so happy that one of the mainstream Linux desktops has returned to a sensible desktop look.
I am very, very happy. As I mentioned in another room, it's enough to make me want to get a decent computer.
There is no cloud service sitting in the middle of the connection.
*My* computer and *my* phone are now integrated, without someone else's server sitting in between. I want to say "Brilliant!" but it should be the way *everyone* does it.
2019-11-26 10:15 from IGnatius T Foobar
Ok, one more happy moment here. KDE comes with a phone integration
app. And it does something we all want: it talks to your phone over the
LOCAL NETWORK.
There is no cloud service sitting in the middle of the connection.
I had heard about that. Which sort of integration does it bring? Does it push your smartphone notifications into your desktop and the other way around?