Slashdot Mirror

I might go back to LXDE some day. My "safe" desktop is Mate.

Last year they added a 0.1 version utility to set hotkeys. (it's in debian 9 as part of the deb package). Nice little thing, since editing the xml for openbox is a bit of a silly pain. I need my alt-f9 for minimizing.

https://blog.lxde.org/2016/11/...

LXDE does understand Win + D, the only dumb thing is Win key alone doesn't open the start menu, you need to hit ctrl-esc instead. I'd have to try remapping X11-wide the Win key to ctrl-esc and see if it prevent the Win + key shortcuts. Duh!
Tip : if you try to use Lubuntu, you'll notice the icons are butt ugly. Bunch of gray in the start menu. To fix the ugly desktop, change the icon theme to a normal-looking one (e.g. "Adwaita" might be installed already). i.e. I think Mate, LXDE, XFCE etc. desktops work well enough that icon themes and similar are much of what should dictate choice of desktop and distro.
This is so important that I wanted to let ./ know about it :)

I did try q4os : it's a debian with a company behind it that uses Trinity desktop and can look really much like Windows XP. I think it's a bit pointless since the friendly features (super easy software installer with almost nothing in it) and familiarity don't really help. Might be good though for its stated niche : end user desktop in professional business setting where it's the sysadmin that provides the stuff (perhaps the special packages?) and the user only provides the work.

You should try Lubuntu the lightweight version based on the LXDE desktop ...

LXTerminal - no dependencies to GNOME, light, supports tabs, moving tabs and naming tabs, copy and paste. I don't need anything else from terminal emulators. http://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXTerm...

I'm having no trouble with KDE, but I am keeping an eye on RazorQT/LXDE-QT, which will likely be my preferred "alternative" DE for constrained-resource systems.

Appears so: http://wiki.lxde.org/en/PCManFM

http://blog.lxde.org/?p=990

I'd like to see more vanilla versions of this software.

Well sure.

Here's the protocol extension: http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/randrproto/randrproto.txt

Here's the xlib API:
http://xcb.freedesktop.org/manual/group__XCB__RandR__API.html

Here's the command line tool:
http://linux.die.net/man/1/xrandr

And here are a bunch of GUI wrappers:
http://christian.amsuess.com/tools/arandr/
http://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXRandR

Which would you like?

Open Source Software has become almost as bad as the commercial counter parts in wanting to wrap everything up as one big GUI package. I don't want a bunch of bologna to download and run to configure dual monitors if I want to use a very lightweight window manager, or setup an embedded solution such as a kiosk.

Some times yes, but this isn't one of those cases. It's one of the nice really well designed parts, and not only that but any of those tools will work with any system. They modify the monitor layout, X sends a RANDR XEvent to the window manager and everything just works.

I'd recommend http://lxde.org/

KDE tries to be too much like Windows and actually does it. There are soooo many services, extensions, config files, dot directories (aka crap strewn all over the place) that it's simply become a bloated buggy mess. Gnome/Unity did some really strange and confusing things but in the end ended up being railroaded into the Mark Shuttleworth Agenda and is pretty much a tablet UI on a PC desktop now.

This is the evolution of FOSS. Things which start to suck tend to get replaced by things which suck less. The open source desktop isn't losing, it's just KDE has jumped the shark and Gnome (Unity) has gone insane. Two of the earliest game changers of the FOSS Desktop. Luckily, people with more time than I have saddled themselves with the task of changing what sucks (Thanks guys/gals) about these two Desktops and we've got some alternatives. You can't do that with Windows or Apple. You get only one and if it sucks, too bad. Buy the next version and hope.

PS: have a look at LXDE or Cinnamon for something similar, yet different.

LXDE.

The problem I have with comparing Linux to Windows on the desktop is that I think Windows stinks on the desktop.

Agreed.

I want an operating system to run applications.

Seconded.

It should be a kernel, drivers, codecs and the base API, with a singular update manager, and text configuration files.

The word you are looking for is "Debian". Seriously, I just switched back from Ubuntu to Debian on my main laptop, and it's so nice to be rid of the bloat, the stupid UI tweaks, the indecipherable decisions to break what already works well. I will grant you that the default desktop install of Debian installs GNOME, but you can easily install LXDE ('sudo tasksel install lxde-desktop') or XFCE ('sudo tasksel install xfce-desktop') or Fluxbox, Openbox, wmii, ratpoison, etc.

Try http://wiki.lxde.org/ You'll not regret

Two things:

1. Don't do it (unless they've asked and you don't mind a full-time job supporting them forever)
2. Linux Mint, not Ubuntu

Mint is based on Ubuntu, but comes with all the post-install crap already done for you. It has the bottom panel with menu button (not bar). It's nice and green, not brown.

My recommendation for older machines is LXDE on Ubuntu or Mint. It can run nicely in 128-256MB RAM.

Wow, I'm surprised that anyone still uses the Xandros shipped with the EEE. Seriously? You do? No flame, a honest question. I have an EEE 701 4G (now used by my wife who has been hospitalized for the last three months, and has a few more to do)... I used the default Xandros distro for very long, especially it was quite well configured for the small screen. Eventually the lack of Asus updating their repositories (still Firefox 2.x, no?) made me abandon the platform.

I switched to DebianEEPC, installed LXDE and the few apps needed and was happy. When my wife went to the hospital, I gave it to her as is and she has no problem using it at all. So it is userfrienldy enough as she really is computer illiterate.

You really keep using the shipped Xandros? More power to you, but I'd like to know why :-)

But yes, I remember them mounting as /media/D:... I guess it was to keep familiarity with a system that can't handle a simple tree and needs a tree for each drive...

(Nice sig... Like it.)

So you are saying it is not X11 that is slow but Linux... Oh man you are taking it out of the frying pan and into the fire.

He's correct. Look at Gnome/KDE/XFCE. Some of these are billed as "optimized" and "lightweight".

Yes, they run fast on fast hardware. But boy do they use a lot of RAM!... and you wouldn't want to run them on an old P3 if you could avoid it.

Then compare to something like LXDE. You lose a lot of GUI goodness, but memory and CPU usage drop like a brick. I use LXDE for all my servers that need a remote desktop. (which right now is just one :P )

Actually a big part of the RAM usage *is* Xubuntu - see the 'simple comparisons' section of http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7520/1.html where it talks about RAM usage immediately after boot including Lubuntu, which is a much lighter LXDE-based variant of Ubuntu. Lubuntu should become an official Ubuntu derivative using LXDE. The RAM usage stats from that page are:

* Lubuntu 58 MB
* Xubuntu 157 MB
* Ubuntu 154 MB

Yes, Ubuntu used slightly less than Xubuntu, which is a surprise - presumably this was a recent Xubuntu version which is more bloated.

When you have various apps running including Firefox, Lubuntu apparently used about 150 MB vs over 300 MB for Xubuntu / Ubuntu.

Since Lubuntu is quite hard to track down, here are some links:

* http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/Lubuntu-50492.shtml - Lubuntu 9.10 Beta 14 - final release was due Oct 29th but isn't yet available.
* http://download.lxde.org/lubuntu-9.10/ - betas 14 and 23.

Or you could try the LXDE project's distro, or Debian with LXDE: http://lxde.org/download

Actually a big part of the RAM usage *is* Xubuntu - see the 'simple comparisons' section of http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7520/1.html where it talks about RAM usage immediately after boot including Lubuntu, which is a much lighter LXDE-based variant of Ubuntu. Lubuntu should become an official Ubuntu derivative using LXDE. The RAM usage stats from that page are:

* Lubuntu 58 MB
* Xubuntu 157 MB
* Ubuntu 154 MB

Yes, Ubuntu used slightly less than Xubuntu, which is a surprise - presumably this was a recent Xubuntu version which is more bloated.

When you have various apps running including Firefox, Lubuntu apparently used about 150 MB vs over 300 MB for Xubuntu / Ubuntu.

Since Lubuntu is quite hard to track down, here are some links:

* http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/Lubuntu-50492.shtml - Lubuntu 9.10 Beta 14 - final release was due Oct 29th but isn't yet available.
* http://download.lxde.org/lubuntu-9.10/ - betas 14 and 23.

Or you could try the LXDE project's distro, or Debian with LXDE: http://lxde.org/download

I own a 701 too and it is indeed plenty fast. The thing is, that CPU isn't two years old as you claim. It's from 2001. So, two years ago, it was already 6 years old. It is also Asus who chose the chip and not Intel.

Anyway, that's not my point. I don't think "mlund" was criticizing anything about the CPU. He was most certainly talking about the screen size and only that. As an 701 owner, I must agree with him: it's really too small and pretty much all other netbooks came with 1024x600 resolution which at least is close to 1024x768 form days yonder. 800x480 is really limited. It is usable with a Window Manager like LXDE but you need to tweak applications left and right (Less "To" fields in the Thunderbird compose window, for example). Personally, I think that the Asus 900 series would have been the better choice for me, but I just couldn't wait and had to have my toy.

(I still use my Asus EEE 701 pretty much everyday.... Runs Debian just fine... Application statup times are a bit high, but I guess that's the SSD)

I don't think so, I don't want three slow, sluggish and unstable applications which try to do everything. I want three applications which do what they are supposed to do.

The whole integration paradigm is obsolete. A file manager today does much less than Norton Commander did. If I want to edit files in a hex mode I fire up a hex editor. Or think of Netscape/Mozilla, then came Firefox, Chrome is even more simple.

The task is of course to find out what matters. LXDE does all you want it to do, all bugs are known. With Gnome and KDE they reintroduce bugs, applications never become stable. Take KDE4, I prefer KDE over Gnome but it takes so much time, you discover bugs within 15 minutes of use, some background processes eat your memory, and you can't simply go, fix a bug and recompile because the whole environment became overly complex.

I think simple Desktop environment projects as LXDE show how do it right: focus on speed and responsiveness.

Don't try to be artificially different, don't confuse, do what users want but don't do more; keep dependencies as few as possible, if it doesn't work as intended throw the component away. Do one thing with one application. And most important of all: The Desktop Environment is not the application. It should be like a professional servant, you won't notice him and you don't need to waste your time to command him.

I still think your original comment was setting the bar far too low in terms of hardware requirements.

Most certainly not on the speed of the CPU. Your gripe seems to be with the RAM. I did not say that my EEE would be sufficient, I gave exact specs: 1GHz, 512Meg RAM.

But XP is also a legacy OS whose life-cycle is only being extended for netbooks because the hardware doesn't meet the minimum requirements for Microsoft's current offering.

True, but you have to wonder what exactly Microsoft was thinking. Now Windows 7 may, or may not, meet the requirements of netbooks. That remains to be seen. Also: you have to be kidding me: 128Meg graphics memory? What for? It's insanely high: with that amount of RAM one could quadruble-buffer a 3840x2160x24bit screen! Yes, I know they don't use the framebuffer directly and it's probably to use the 3D capabilities of the graphics chipset, but wow, that's an insane amount of RAM for displaying a few Windows. (To a lesser extent: 16Gig for the operating system alone... Uh?!?))

This is my point, a "lean OS" as you describe it is not comfortable in 512Meg. Usual XP setups with that amount of RAM would normally page much of the kernel on disk (not suitable for SSD). Coupled with an integrated graphics chipset's used of "shared memory", the actual RAM for user-space applications is drastically reduced.

To be fair, with 512Meg it used to be comfortable with XP running SP2. (Remember my old second hand laptop? That ran perfectly fine with WinXP SP2) What I didn't think about was the shared graphics memory. You are right indeed. So, 1GB RAM? Is that ok with you? (Still, for Windows 7, that means it should run okay on 896Meg RAM when the graphics card allocates 128Meg RAM. You really think that's going to happen?)

A normal Windows XP SP3 boots up about with 200Meg-250Meg used. That still gives you another 250Meg that you can use. That's why I say "not comfortable", because I know starting a few apps will eat those in no-time. With 1GB, you have more headroom and hence you're "comfortable".

As an example: I'm actually typing this on my wifes machine: two users logged in, she runs Firefox 3 and I run Firefox 3 (both have multiple tabs open), Thunderbird (5 different email accounts of which 3 IMAP, tons of RSS feeds), Putty, iTunes 7, AVG Antivirus 8, Java is loaded (probably visited a website containing an applet), Gnucleus, Truecrypt and some Bluetooth controll thingy. Used memory with WinXP SP3 is 803Meg. I have never see it go much beyond 1Gig RAM used. (It has 2Gig installed, I upgraded one day because RAM was dirt-cheap and on sale. Originally it did have 512Meg and worked fine...)

I'm sceptical that a 'normal user' does given

Tell me what you think he does. I can only think of two things and that would be photo editing and video editing. Weirdly enough, I have never seen a normal user doing either one.

The typical office clerk doesn't want to mess around with a non-standard LXDE environment. The typical office clerk uses Windows, which as you admit does not run comfortably in the specs you quoted.

The typical office clerk works with what is given to him. He has nothing to say about it. I've seen people using Windows NT when XP was already on SP1, I've seen people using OS/2 warp. Sure, not at home, but in offices: you bet!

The typical office clerk does not fiddle with settings, because he has no right to fiddle with settings. You don't seriously think that the typical office clerk can't install software, can't even run regedit.exe if he wanted to and can't write to system directories. I'm talking Windows here, and you do know that there is good reason to set up that limited usage for office clerks.

As for LXDE, you should at least check out the scree

For example, my 78 yo grandad runs xubuntu on his 600 MHz PIII w. 128 MB RAM. He doesn't like it, it is too slow, but he is not prepared to shell out $150 on top of a laptop for $500.

Look on eBay for PC100 RAM? Last time I actually needed to buy new RAM for old PCs, I went to kahlon.com (I'm just a satisfied customer). 2x256Meg will set him back 40$, and will make his PC on the same level as an Asus EEE PC 701 4G. It works perfectly well with 512Meg RAM and at 670MHz using Debian Lenny and LDXE

Thanks for the plug, I'd never heard of LXDE before, but it looks interesting. I've got an old iBook G4 that runs Tiger, but at a speed that's just barely usable. I was considering putting Xubuntu on it (Ubuntu with XFCE), but I think I'll put on a CLI-only Ubuntu install to start and try LXDE instead out of curiosity (quite easy to do now since they've apparently added LXDE to the Intrepid repos). :)

Cheers,

LXDE uses OpenBox and adds a lot of XDG functionality, PCManFM, and basic GTK+ apps. The whole desktop runs in abuot 64MB RAM.

But LXDE (+OpenBox) rocks!

Well, you really don't need to touch the kernel and can use it precompiled. With new Desktop Environments as LXDE there is a fair chance that the complexity mistakes made with KDE and Gnome will not be made again. Ideally your hardware provider gets your hardware run with the kernel.

Personally I wonder why they want to abandon Windows XP support at all, Windows XP looks like a perfect cash cow for me, no need for further investments, most of the bugs are fixed and you can even skin it to look like Vista.

I don't understand why they want to abandon XP. I other word, they want to leave the Netbook market to Linux. Fine with me as long it is not Xandros. If you take LXDE instead of GNOME and KDE it still provides you with all you need. The Desktop is mature. It doesn't matter which operating system you run as long as it is fast and saves your battery.

Microsoft does not get it. The Desktop is mature. You don't need to provide Vista to your users. No one likes Vista. Instead they come up with Windows 7, in other words Vista++. Be sure Windows7 will eat even more memory. And users will again say: get us XP or we switch to Linux or we switch to Mac.

The real debacle for Microsoft is the merging business of software reselling. In other words, if Microsoft does not get you a Windows license, your used software vendor will, and you also have all the old machines and their licenses you can sell for cheap. Because Microsoft is going to get "cheap XP" and zero-cost Linux as competitors of "Windows Azurecloud".

If you run XP and your computer gets damaged then why do you have to get a new XP license with your new notebook? Bundling is a total ripoff! Time to complain. In some nations the courts made bundling illegal!

The day the bundling business dies we kiss Microsoft goodbye.

First of all, XP doesn't work well on 128MB unless you ignore the required safety mechanisms, use an unpatched version (like SP1) and don't run any applications.

Try putting LXDE, however, on that same machine, and you will have a modern, FD.o compliant desktop based on the light OpenBox. It uses 42MB at boot on my two (previously Win2000) laptops with 128MB.

Want better? Slitaz is a similar setup in a 26MB .iso. It can run completely in memory in a machine with just 256MB. Talk about blazing fast ....

Fluxbox is really nice, have you tried LXDE? It has the speed of Fluxbox (it uses Openbox as its wm), and is still pretty since it uses GTK 2. I have it running on Arch on my netbook (NC10).

It is not so easy. Greepeace actually has a "computer waste" focus for quite some time and they developed some good pratices. All companies do now Green IT, not only APPLE.

I would suspect that the solution to computer problems lies in the software. You can install less resource-consuming applications, for instance as a Linux user the LXDE desktop environment, this is organic software. These days hardware *burns* a lot of energy but responsible is also software-as-a-brake (Saab). The environmental effects of speed optimisation would be great.

How come that your Vista-desktop is slower than your good old Win98 installation although you basically just do the very same things. A 1998 style processor today consumes very little energy. A fast low carbon desktop would make a lot of sense for many commercial and private users in times where energy pricing explodes.

Just 5% of IT energy reduction would have massive effects on the economy at large.

The way forward for the easy Linux Desktop is LXDE, not the idiosyncratic gnome with all the components and Mono dependencies. http://www.lxde.org/

I don't trust Novell, look what they did to OpenOffice, they forked it and Microsoft pays their project.

But what really is a no-go: The collaborate with a communist party. How bad is that?

I have three laptops with similar specs right now. Debian Lenny + LXDE works great for them. FF3 is fine if you don't open more than two tabs. LXDE is a nice, fully-functional desktop based on OpenBox and following Freedesktop.org specs. The difference to Gnome is minimal.

I'm glad they're finally going to put some attention on boot time and speed. I'm a big fan of getting your boot times down, mine is 8 seconds (brag brag...).

But when I see Ubuntu and it boots slower than XP and... Well, feels slower than XP, I have to facepalm. Linux is supposed to be the faster one, it's supposed to be the one where you can say "Man, you use XP? It's so slow! Use Linux!", but with Ubuntu you can't really say that. Not that it's Ubuntu's fault, I put the blame on Gnome. The Gnome desktop is bulky and slow, your *panel* shouldn't be using CPU cycles constantly, or the amount of memory gnome-panel uses. There's alternatives for sure (And I'm not talking about KDE, it's almost as bad.), but you have to piece it together yourself because it isn't a single DE. I.E, Openbox WM, pypanel or bmpanel or lxpanel or lbpanel or one of those (I prefer pypanel and bmpanel), pcmanfm filenavigator (Can also set icons on the desktop and manage wallpapers), and on and on. There's tons of lightweight programs out there with the same abilities, just not packaged neatly together. But people are trying! Just have a look at crunchbang linux and DEs like lxde. Using this stuff, you can get that old 550mhz thinkpad you have in your closet up and running again, webbrowsing and e-mailing at lightning speeds. THIS, to me, is what Linux should represent. Not the slow bulky thing you have to buy a new computer for!

But about the other things with the new Ubuntu release, polishlinux has a great review of what Ubuntu alpha looks like right now, and what we can expect from it here.

Looks like nautilus is finally getting tabs, although the lighter pcmanfm has had tabs for awhile. I'm really excited about is improvements with the network manager and with xorg... Two places that really need improvement. Seems like wireless support improves with each release, and I hope it continues on that awesome path. And it seems that the kernel 2.6.27 will be out in time for this release! It's already on rc5, and most kernels don't go past rc10 before release (And they're releasing an rc once a week, or about once a week).

It's all very exciting, but again the one thing I hope for more than anything else is speed and bloat! Keep Linux the OS that you say "You don't even have to get a new computer for it. It's fast, unlike Vista/XP/OSX/Everythingever", please please please

I think, LXDE is a cool, free desktop: http://lxde.org/