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Enlightenment, not enhancement
http://www.enlightenment.org.au/

It still is pretty cool.
Eterm seems to be dead, though, at http://www.eterm.org/
Term is very elegant. I just traded it for gnome-terminal, when I started using gnome, for shortcut-consistency, and to stop alienating other users. But its looks are much better than other terminals.

I think it needs to be made clear (no pun) yet again, that all this work is not just about drop shadows (they are just one thing you can do with it) or "useless" eye-candy (sometimes beautification is critical to the user). This work is about new options in enhancing usability and improving performance. These new extentions do far more than just add shadows and transparency (no, not translucency, that is something else).

Off-screen compositing allows new effects that can add emphasis to certain user interface elements. They allow for windows with arbitrary shapes that do not appear "jagged" and "rough". Better performance means we can create more fluid effects in windowing systems. For instance, users are much more comfortable with things that slide around or fade smoothly rather than just snapping into position. It allows the eye to keep track of what's changing. Tools like Exposé are now possible. Overall, there are more possibilities for open source user interface developers to add significantly more polish to the desktop without resorting to cheap hacks (such as the static transparency found in KDE, Eterm, and Aterm).

And just to reinforce the classic uses of this: drop shadows really do add emphasis to the current focused window (I write this on an OSX box). Also, it can be really convenient to have window transparency in many cases (for example, when I have multiple Terminals open I can read a man page behind the console I'm currently typing in). Again, keep in mind that these features are not the goal but simply benefits of the new extentions.

The future of the F/OSS desktop is really looking up thanks to new technology like this. Eventually these things will be hardware accelerated (like Quartz Extreme) and then some really cool things will be possible.

So, in conclusion, don't knock or belittle the work that's going into X.org these days. In the future, most of you will appreciate them the same way you appreciate the flexibility you have now with choosing how to configure your window managers to your liking. No doubt a lot of people will take this stuff and produce a lot of crap, but we'll definitely see a lot of excellent work that will use it to improve the user experience.

I haven't read the article since it now appears Slashdottted, but, if anyone cares, personally I really like Eterm. It's lightweight, fast, and also quite pretty--it has a lot of nifty background images built in and it allows for pseudo-transparency. Very customizable, too. I use it on my desktop Linux machine all the time.

There are very few clients (puTTY and Powerterm) on the PC that can handle our product. The Mac situation is much worse. It took me a few months to find an appropriate solution for working with our clients from my Mac. The winners are:

Eterm -free- Get version 0.9 through Fink. It's much faster than Apple's terminal application and is much more configurable.
Here's a shot of a typical Eterm on my machine

DataComet -not free- but worth it. This program is similar to Powerterm on the PC side. It can handle just about any emulation you throw at it. Powerterm and DataComet both include their own font suites which allow for full PC-ANSI emulation, for example. Very comprehensive package. It integrates with the built-in shell and even handles my company's software.
Here's a screenshot of DataComet on my system

Here's a random screenshot.

Note: There is a Powerterm for Mac OSX, but it's fairly expensive, and DataComet performs as well. Hit me up if you have any questions....

The author went on to have an interesting converstaion with Micahel Jennings, author of Eterm on Bugtraq here.

There are a few things that I do to enhance my OS X experience. I work in Linux systems deployment for a software firm, and spend mucho time at the command line. I *do* think that the Apple Terminal application is a bit slow, so I use Eterm under XDarwin/Gnome for my terminal needs. My other suggestion is installing Launchbar. This program makes every command/application/document/etc. available by typing a few characters. It's highly configurable and allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard for just about every task.

These tools, plus the multitasking ability (versus OS 9's inability) allow me to be more efficient on OS X. Speed doesn't really matter as much, since I can still get my work done.

Oh, and here's a nifty screenshot that illustrates that productivity :)

[-d] clip fish, swim on root window

[-d] clip fish, swim on root window

Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.

AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.

Steps in roll-your-own:

Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.

If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.

Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.

The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.

Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.

Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.

Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.

File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.

Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.

Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!

I'm in the market as well and I found this article pretty helpful. To summarize, unless all you do is hack audio/video, it's a waste of money to get a P4-M w/ DDR memory, despite the faster bus, etc. Photoshop and AutoCAD tests were actually faster on the PIII-M.

I was leaning toward the Toshiba Satellite 5005-S504 until I read this. Running linux is a must, so now I'm considering a Dell Inspiron 8100.

Both of the above have UXGA (1600x1200) displays. I originally tought I wanted a Powerbook G4, but am not convinced that I can be productive on a 1152x768 display. My development environment looks like this: Left 1/3 of the screen is an Eterm running screen. Right 2/3 is XEmacs. A higher resolution means more code visible at a time and/or a more readable font.

You could always try Eterm, my emulator of choice. Has a lot more visual options.


- Milo Hyson

Gnome-terminal offers this option too.
Normal rxvt allows background pixmaps.

These are all cool looking for screenshots , but you need a heck of a fast machine / X server to get it to run smoothly, and I find I end up getting eyestrain and reverting to good old fashioned black / green in the end

I don't know what you're referring to (in the /. article) but I've had pseudo-transparent terminals for quite awhile. Eterm does it, and I think there's a few others as well..

(pseudo-transparent as in it grabs your background, and manipulates that, but it won't show any windows behind it)

Check out Eterm.org if you don't already know the URL.