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Okay, this story makes it offical... I'm the only person who wants a desktop that is quick, and extremely easy to use, and doesn't give a damn about how sleek it looks.

From anti-aliased fonts, to theme-able browsers, to transparent windows, I still don't give a damn!

If there is anyone else out there that wants a fast and extremely intuitive and easy desktop, use XFce.

For most people, Gnome certainly beats OpenWindows. But if you don't like the Gnome desktop (I don't particularly) and the icons, you certainly have enough choices: XFCE, icewm, and many others. That's the nice thing about X11: you get the choice.

If it isn't, you should easily be able to get XFCE to compile on your machine, as long as you can get GTK+ to compile. It's not a complete CDE replacement, but it's good enough.

Oh hell yeah! GNOME and KDE are greaat but they are not as useable as the CDE UI. Now if you want the CDE look'n'feel but with a much faster environment and with many more capabilities than GNOME or KDE you have to try XFce.

No, bullshit. No "Desktop Wars". Just go try it and see for your self.

I believe XFCE can do a reasonable imitation of how CDE looks and works. It's GPLed and compiles on Linux/FreeBSD... probably others as well.

Why don't you use something else then? I recommend XFce. It has that fine CDE look, but it is much faster and safer.

Umm, too late? Get XFce

The idea that WM's have stalled is slightly off base. It's true that basic window managers have not advanced that much in a while but desktop environments have been movingf at a furious pace. Everyone knows about GNOME and KDE but there's lot's more out there than just those two. If you want to see the state-of-the-art in desktop environments you should go check XFce out <http://www.xfce.org>. If you've looked at it before you need to look again. It's got many more capabilities than GNOME or KDE and it's so much faster it's not even funny.

Olivier Fourdan is very good about working others code into the XFce project. The code for many features and additional utilities (xfsamba is a great example) has been incorporated. The key, IMO, is that Olivier, while being very accepting of code and patcher, still keeps the core of the project in focus.

Use XFce then. Especially in combination with ROX-Filer. The two fly. They use the GTK toolkit, and work well with the rest of gnome, but are much much faster.

It's nice to see E still moving along. The more Desktop/WM's we have the better off we'll be. One of the things that seems to be lost in the ranting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H discussions about "The Linux Desktop" is that with all the different GUI options available we can make Linux look like anything we want and thus it will fit into any environment. If you need it to look like WinXX, CDE, Mac or Bob The Builder's desktop it can.

KDE? GNOME ...? Sawmill? WINDOW MAKER?!!!

BAH!

The ONE TRUE window manager for UNIX is MWM, with perhaps it's successor CDE/dtwm. That's the UNIX look'n'feel for ya'. (OOOH those yummy three little buttons!)

The ONE true wm for Linux is FVWM, configured into oblivion with GoodStuff and whatnot, but still looking somwhat like MWM (see above). That's what Linux should look like.

An' don't give me TWM with a bazillion of Xterms. We're not living in bedrock and go back to Xenix on your 286 if you actually want THAT.

/Of course, i personally use none of the above, but that's a whole different story

Simple... XFce. The only full-featured desktop that only takes up 4 megs of RAM, and is the most intuitive thing since NeXT.

1. First, the finished one. You might want to look at XFCE. Think of it as CDE done right. Uses GTK as its widget set, so it interoperates very well with Gnome/GTK programs.
2. Someone else has mentioned GNUSTEP already, but that seems to be advancing about as quickly as GNU/HURD.
3. Lastly, Enlightenment seems to be turning into a complete desktop environment of it's own, and looks good if you like that sort of thing.

Having learned enough C, C++, and perl to at least read most code (and thus be dangerous), I went through the software I was actually using, and whose code looked comprehendable to me. Psh for one, Xfce for another. Signed up for the dev lists, looked at what they were working on. Downloaded the source to xfce, fiddled with it, broke it, downloaded it again & backed it up this time, messed with some of the smaller features until I found one I thought I could improve. Emailed the project guy, who was very nice, and told me how to get code to him. Borrowed my roommate's GTK book, hacked on it until it worked, and sent the modified source in. My name is in the changelog now :)

So basically, look at the stuff you use, on your system, and see which parts you might want to change. Then do it, and if your changes work out, see if the maintainers are interested in them. My change was probably under 50 lines of code, and there was a bug in it when I submitted it, but it's how you get started.
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Okay, this has been one of my pet peeves for a while now. Mainly, I hate start menus. This isn't specific to the "Windows" start button, it extends to the Gnome foot, the big ugly K and the Apple menu. The problem lies within the reliance on mouse positioning to keep the menu open. On desktop machines this isn't such a problem, you can generaly keep pretty good control over your mouse, provided you don't sneeze or are not attacked by a vagrant feline. But then there's laptops. It's a pain in the arse to keep the cursor on a start menu when you're using a touch pad. Maybe I just have fat fingers, but it's just no fun. A better solution is a more CDE like interface ala XFce. Click the menu, it's open, click the item in the menu and the menu closes, your selection executes. In between the first and the second click you could traverse your mouse cursor around the screen twice and do the lambada for all XFce cares.

When are we going to see the XFce Alliance and the Enlightenment Confederacy?

Try again. XFCE is a true measure of geeks. Just enough glitz to make it comfortable, yet ultra-focused on getting things done. It's what we professionals like to call, a useable system. :-)

I like CDE too as a desktop. Do I like to work in Motif toolkit? thats a different story.

If you like CDE and dont like Motif. Try Xfce

However it is true that if you install it on a running Linux system it will frag all of your other X/GUI options. I had to do a reinstall on the box I tested it on. It doesn't give you anything more than other Open Source options do, either. If you really need the CDE look-n-feel you should try XFce.

There are just 97 days till the beginning of the 21st century and the next millennium!

I love the choice that GNU/Linux provides. I love offering my friends these same choices when I introduce them to the GNU/Linux operating system. I have multiple sessions configured from gdm. Do you want to use E + GNOME, E standalone, KDE, KDE with E or Window Maker, GNOME + Sawmill, Window Maker standalone, etc...you get the idea. I love it.

The other benefit of having "competing" projects is forced improvement. KDE can borrow ideas from GNOME and vice versa. And the code is there for referrence. With time, you'll see a greater interoperability between KDE and GNOME, rather than a further splintering.

--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org

Miguel is GREAT in his interviews. If there's one thing the Linux community needs, it's more people who know how to have fun when they are discussing something.

I'm not so hot on the massive "Gnome Everywhere" thing, and I don't really like the Qt licensing, so for myself, I just use:

XFCE WM

...then set up the menus with my favorite gnome apps.

Miguel has been a driving force in the desktop and GUI areas. He has a lot of name recognition, skill, personality and drive. I look forward to trying/using his office suite. I hope we see more interviews with him; they are always refreshing.

--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org

Why bother with these over bloated, over rated, highly annoying and hardly usefull wm's? It's something I'll never understand.

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Time will show this to be the case. Just as it showed all those people who, back at SD '95 East, said that there would NEVER be any commercial grade DBMS products ported to linux. I quote a representitive from Computer Associates you, when asked if Ingres would ever be ported to Linux, said "Not only no but HELL NO!!"

Joe

BTW, do you prefer a desktop environment like KDE, Gnome, UDE, or just a GUI like WindowMaker, IceWm, Enlightenment, Black Box, and why?

My personal preference is the XFce desktop with it's own WM, XFwm.

The why is simple, for me. I much prefer tools that come from the unix tradition of small and powerfull. XFce doesn't have a boat load of the things that GNOME or KDE or any of the rest of them have but it's clean, simple, powerfull, easily configurable and does everything you could ever want to get work done.

Now, this does NOT mean that I am against any of the other projects. More power to GNOME and KDE and everyone else out there. I'm just saying that they are of no use to me in my usage of Linux.

Joe