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Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce
kai_hiwatari writes "In Google+, Torvalds criticized the direction that GNOME has taken with GNOME 3. He called GNOME 3 an 'unholy mess' and said that the user experience is unacceptable, adding that because of GNOME 3, he has ditched GNOME for Xfce. He said that Xfce is a step down from GNOME 2 — but a huge step up from GNOME 3."
Xfce is a step down from GNOME 2 â" but a huge step up from GNOME 3.
Then why didn't he just stay with GNOME 2?
Of course as a KDE user myself I want to ask why he didn't switch to KDE instead, but I know better than to open that can of worms. It is almost like asking an emacs user why they don't just switch to vi...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They lost me when they removed the ability to change themes from the default install. I understand the viewpoint of wanting a consistent user interface, but removing basic customisation features is a slap in the face to most Linux users, especially after all the grief that Unity got for not letting you move the dock from the left side.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
not even close. I did this too and I know others who have as well. I think Xfce is going to get a lot of new users as more and more distros move to gnome 3.
Dude that's nothing, Sports Center has whole stories base on one tweet...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
It's a disaster. I installed it on a VM. Luckily, I never use the console of that VM for anything and simply bring up windows on the host computer's X server. I have been highly reluctant to install Fedora 15 on anything after experiencing what it looks like and works like on my VM. It's nearly completely broken. I would be significantly less efficient if I actually tried to use it, and I would be constantly frustrated and annoyed by things that didn't work at all, or were stupidly redone to be more obscure and difficult.
And that's with 'forced compatibility mode' because my VM doesn't support 3D acceleration very well.
To be clear, it's the panel, shell and window manager that are broken. The applications that use the toolkit are fine.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Earlier GNOMES and KDEs imitated Windows. One thing Windows did right was the Taskbar. It is, in all seriousness, an extremely good metaphor. It separates the acts of launching programs from managing which ones are running, because, dammit, those are different things.
OSX, with its Dock, conflates launching a program with looking at a window that it has opened. The implicit metaphor is that all programs are always "running," and that the messy details of actually starting a process should be wrapped up by the operating system so that we don't need to think about it. Then, multitasking within a program falls to the program itself. Everybody ends up implementing their own tabs.
Android does the same thing as OSX. All "apps" are always "running," more-or-less, from a GUI point of view. Under-the-hood, they obviously are not; they have to restore themselves from saved state. But this varies from program to program, and is one of the reasons Android has an inconsistent user experience. Given an unfamiliar program, you don't know at first when you're quitting it, and when you're leaving it running in the background.
Now, Gnome3 appears also to falling into the OSX camp.
What Torvalds seems to prefer, in KDE3.5, Gnome2, and now XFCE, is a more Windows-like metaphor for multitasking. I'm with him. I think that's one thing Windows did right.
Personally, I think KDE 3.5 was the height of full-featured Linux desktop environments, and it's degraded into so much juvenile bullshit ever since. Now, just give me something lightweight that uses a reasonable multitasking paradigm and gets out of the way. XFCE fits the bill.
I've worked as a sysadmin in academic HPC for 10+ years. 1000+ Linux servers. I've worked with Gnome for years, since the 1.x days.
Gnome 3 is so bad I've switched to using Windows 7. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot were the Gnome3 developers "thinking"?
Want to refactor a crap ton of code? I understand completely. Want to completely trash the most usable Linux UI? Go die in a fire. Seriously.
Start listening to your user base, or you'll quickly cease to have one.
I tested out Gnome 3 on Arch for about a week before I decided it was time to abandon it. I also ended up at Xfce. It gets the job done.
Yeah, I'm continually surprised that his choices are so... conventional. I don't mean that in a bad way, I'm just surprised. I run Windows on my home desktop by choice, have defended many aspects of it a lot over the years here and elsewhere... and even I run xmonad when I'm on a Linux system I use more than momentarily.
Yeah let's just have everything stagnate and stay the same forever because poor lusers can't figure out the button moved 100 pixels and has a different icon. Wah wah wah.
Yeah, let's add silly animations and flashy icons that make the desktop dramatically less useful just so we can show everyone how cool we are.
Hopefully with a few more famous users switching to xfce it can progress to something as good as Gnome 2 was before they started Windowizing it.
Because he is a brilliant and positive influence in the community who is outspoken and contributes in a major way. Because if it weren't for him there wouldn't be a gnome or kde. The man has created more jobs than Obama with his "free" code. I may not always agree with him but I'll be damned if I don't lend him my ear.
Why do people care what Linus' opinion is with regard to window managers?
Good question. Why do people care what the guy who created one of the world's most successful operating systems thinks about GUIs that run on it?
I started using Linux full-time in 1994, wrote a number of Linux books, did a whole bunch of server and desktop installations and was a huge fan of Linux+KDE beginning with KDE pre-1.0 releases. I was religiously all-Linux, all-KDE, all the time until KDE 4 on Fedora 9.
I stuck with KDE4 for several months; at first, I couldn't imagine changing the desktop environment I'd had for so long.
Eventually, however, I realized I spent far too much time trying to configure and reconfigure my KDE4 desktop to behave and appear in ways that were acceptable to me. It seemed like I was always spending time configuring my desktop, yet never getting it quite right. I'd be in the middle of a real task and something would annoy the hell out of me and the next thing you know I'd be knee-deep in configuration and kludging and after a couple hours I'd determinedly force myself to give up and live with it (frown, frown) only to find myself configuring once again before the day was out.
After about three months of that, I switched to GNOME 2 on Fedora. It worked well for me and I decided I actually rather liked GNOME. Once again I settled into an environment, developed a workflow and keyboard and mouse habits and figured out how to do all of the little tweaks I wanted to do each time I did a new distro install to support new hardware, etc.
But when GNOME3 details came out and as the KDE4/GNOME3/Unity trifecta started to overtake the Linux world, I got really frustrated. I switched to Xfce for a while, but like Linus, found it not quite where I wanted to be. I tried to return to Windowmaker, which I'd used back in the day before KDE-1pre releases. But all these years later and no native file manager? No drag-and-drop? Yes, I *can* use the command line, but sometimes I'd like to have a working desktop metaphor as well.
So I tried Enlightenment. Nightmare; a toy project. You spend all of your time just trying to get the install consistent.
Then I realized that I felt really good about the Macs I was encountering at the university where I am faculty. So I committed my first Linux-betrayal since 1994, repartitioned, and installed a Hackintosh partition to "test out" OSX.
Three months later I'd built a brand new Hackintosh desktop and bought all Apple software, the first software I'd bought in decades after decades as a free software user. The Linux partition, while still there, was rarely booted any longer. Six months later I'd ditched the Hackintosh desktop and bought a MacBook Pro and reformatted all of my long-term archival media to be Mac-readable.
There are things that frustrate me about Macs (most notably the spinning beach ball moments and the inadequacy of Mac Ports next to the RedHat and Debian repositories, less notably but still there the cost of the hardware and difficulty of cheap repairs with eBay spare parts), but I am in all honesty more productive than I've been in a very, very long time, and once again rarely have to worry about being pissed off by, or spending time I don't have reconfiguring or trying to kludge apart, my desktop—just like back in the KDE3 and GNOME2 days.
Too bad those days are over, but I fear that free software has lost this padawan to the dark side for life. Once you get used to no configuration, no kludges, everything works to your satisfaction 95 percent of the time, it's really hard to imagine going back to tweaks, hacks, editing configuration files, and new releases that routinely require that all of these be rediscovered and that come down the pipe in regular updates and are required for recent hardware support.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Clearly you must be in charge of Facebook's UI.
Change for the sake of change is pointless and harms usability. No one was complaining about the basics of GNOME 2 and changing to GNOME-shell or whatever is fixing something that doesn't need fixed.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Well, Linus has a reputation for seeking lean, effective functionality in every tool he uses. And because he gets a lot of attention, his words can cause large shifts in usage patterns -- and more users brings more development effort.
For my part, I'm overjoyed. I've been using Xfce for a long time, because Gnome and KDE are both festering piles of bloat. From my perspective, Xfce was a step up from Blackbox... although the last release of Xfce seemed dangerously bloaty to me. Obviously, my taste runs to the ultra-lean. In any case, I'm hoping huge numbers of Linus' fan boys follow him blindly and unthinkingly to Xfce just to be cool, because that can only mean better support for Xfce.
The other day I shut down my laptop and went to pack my lunch before going to work. I came back to find Gnome telling me that 'Program Unknown has not shut down, do you want to close it?'
Aaaagh! For fsck's sake. If I wanted that kind of crap I'd be using Windows, not Linux. If I didn't want it to shut down I wouldn't have told it to shut down.
Gnome has spent the last couple of years adopting most of the dumber ideas from Windows and with Gnome 3 they seem to be adopting the dumber ideas from MacOS and tablet operating systems.
I agree that Linus is a luminary.
I don't agree that his opinion regarding UI is worth a damn.
I would be like taking fashion advice from a textile industry engineer.
His skills are orthogonal to UI, and his decisions were bad in the past (KDE!! WTF!?) .
I understand XFCE might be better suited to him, mainly because he won't need to learn new tricks.
For the general public, Gnome Shell or Unity are great, they are a lot easier to learn from scratch, more discoverable, and suited to actual newbies, a very important audience to take into account when you have a single digit marketshare.
For experts, they are also great, because they reward knowledge, are searchable, and save screen real estate.
Most importantly, they are designed by specialists, with the user in mind, and actual tests, with actual users.
A kernel developers opinion is not that relevant here.
Haha! I've been using XFCE as my desktop environment for years and years, and for the same reasons, kde became to big, gnome stupidified the desktop to the point I couldn't do WHAT I WANT with my own desktop.
XFCE4 for the win!
jaz
Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. No-one sees motorcycles
Is everyone in the Gnome / KDE / Unity groups a Microsoft mole, engaged in sucking out utility from those desktop environments? Is there no one there who realizes how big a mistake they made?
It's one thing for a single group to screw the pooch, but for all three to get the same brain-dead urge to redesign smacks of conspiracy.
Something people don't appreciate about MS is that they test their UI with users, quite extensively. That doesn't mean they always make the right choice, but it does give them a better chance of it.
This was also something Apple used to be really good at with MacOS Classic. Hell they basically invented the concept. However with OS-X they decided to throw out a bunch of their own findings in favour of a more flashy interface.
I also think another problem is people are going all gaga for smartphones and tablets and seem to forget that they are not normal computers. What works well for them doesn't work well for a desktop necessarily. So an interface that is good on a touch-screen only phone might not be what you want on a keyboard and mouse desktop. However UI designers (at least the ones in the Linux works and Apple world, we'll see what goes on in MS land when Windows 8 hits) want to make their UI more "tablety" without consideration for if that is in fact the right way to do things on the desktop.
There's a sig out there by someone in Slashdot land attributed to Henry Ford: If i'd 've asked my customers what they wanted they'd 've said "a faster horse"...
May the lies we live by make us strong, healthy, happy and wise - Kurt Vonnegut.
Good point about Linus not being a UI god. I tend to agree less with some other stuff though:
- There are not that many computer newbies anymore. My take is that unless your approach is clearly superior, you should go with familiar, which Unity is not, and Gnome, a bit.
- Unity has a large amount of issues, both for noobs and advanced users: my parents need shortcuts to several folders, which seems impossible; and i have a dual screen setup with my main screen on the right, ie I need the menu bar on the right too. Apparently, Shuttleworth don't want that.
- Which does lead us to confidence and governance issues. I'm frankly getting the vibe that decision regarding linux features, especially UI, are made by a gang of developpers who want to impress they peers and do fancy stuff, with little-to-no input from actual users. With the compounding difficulty that unfinished stuff gets relased (and NOT as beta).
Experimenting with stuff is fine... up to the point where the experiment takes over the business, resulting in stuff being released that should never have left the lab, because it's both pointless and unfinished. Meanwhile, grub2 still craps half of my installs, dual-screen is flaky...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Gene Roddenberry once said something similar: "If we let the fans write the show, it would be crap." (Or some such thing, I'm paraphrasing from memory.
------RM
Tiling? I'd be very surprised if Linus didn't use overlapping windows. There's no need to limit the number of visible windows to those who can be fully visible - most of them are waiting for your input, or compiling something (in which case you usually only want to see when it stops).
Of course, overlapping windows work better with focus-follows-mouse and no-raise-on-click; that allows you to copy/paste between windows without any of them popping up to the front.
Back on topic, I have ditched Gnome 3 myself, for multiple reasons: .gvfs goes against everything that is holy.
- The amount of mouse movement you have to do is ridiculous. Sometimes all the way to the left, then all the way to the right again, to do something really simple.
- As Linus said, the assumption that you only want to run one of each app is truly braindead.
- Multi-monitor support is even more broken than in Gnome 2. Which makes the first point even more of an issue, when you can't even open a menu on your second monitor, but have to drag the mouse over to the first one.
- You can't run it in a VM - you have to use the fallback mode, which means you have to relate to two different interfaces. (And the fallback mode is way less functional than Gnome 2)
- I don't have Windows keys on my keyboard. The shortcuts assume that you do. Well, Gnome 3 devs, if you really like Windows that much, run it!
- No way to set fonts? Or DPI? I don't want "larger", I want a 10 pt font to be exactly 10 pt (~3.5 mm), so it's the same size on all my monitors and printers.
- The superuser is not allowed access to a user directory?
- Lack of man pages. In a terminal, I don't want to deal with graphics-laden help files. Lack of documentation in general, for that matter.
- For having been so simplified since Gnome 2, it's strange that the memory usage skyrockets. Or perhaps not, given it requires three different interpreted languages (not counting bash, sed and awk), and lists of libraries longer than my arm. (just do ldd on a gnome executable).
- I take back that the Gnome 3 users have Windows envy. It's Mac envy too - disable all but one mouse buttons.
- How can I unmount a USB drive? Or eject a CD? Or... pretty much anything where either a desktop icon or the "places" menu would have come in handy.
But most of all, the excessive mouse waving required makes it completely unusable, especially with more than one monitor (in which case virtual desktops become completely unusable).
It's a steaming pile of technology, and must be aimed at iPad users incapable of doing more than one thing at a time, and who get confused by more than one mouse button or difficult things like "font size" or "minimize".
This is why I stick with Fedora 14 and gentoo, and not F15, nor will I go to F16 unless Red Hat forks and brings back Gnome 2.
Gnome 3 and Unity both have a hard-on for tablets. It is as if the people behind the projects think desktops and laptops will disappear within the next couple years and everybody will either be using tablets or smart phones instead.
I'm with Linus!
XFCE does seem to be heading in the right direction. It has only one panel to rule them all. And you can create several of them. In fact, you can configure them and place them in a way such that you can simulate the general interface functionality of Gnome 2! XFCE has adopted the Gstreamer framework (good thing for browser plugins). And the file manager is very similar to Nautilus. Generally the core applications are solid. As icing on the cake, XFCE is refreshingly fast. So it feels like a lightweight Gnome 2 to me.
But XFCE does have its pitfalls. For example, it's not easy to generate application launchers on the panel by dragging from the application menu if the panel auto-hides. But that's not something you do every day. And there are slim pickings for panel applets and glaring omissions such as an applet for cpu frequency monitoring. I'm sure there are a lot more shortfalls, but I'm probably a typical Gnome 2 user (not a power user), so I don't notice.
I don't have Windows keys on my keyboard. The shortcuts assume that you do. Well, Gnome 3 devs, if you really like Windows that much, run it!
That's a bit of a silly stance, even taken somewhat in jest. I use the Windows key more when I'm in Linux than I do in Windows. (It controls my window manager, where it belongs, and... let's just say that xmonad has more operations that I can usefully do with a keyboard than Windows does. In particular, win- changes to the virtual desktop named by that key, and I use a lot of virtual desktops.)
Not having used Gnome 3, I don't know what it does. Does it just default the shortcuts to use Windows, or does it not let you (or make it difficult) to change them?
I personally think that the former is just fine (you optimize for the common case -- and nowadays, nearly everyone has a Windows key), and that the latter is inexcusable.
New study out shows a distinct correlation between desktop preference and IQ.
Preemptive: Looks as though it might have been a hoax.
I think you're drooling over Linus there just a little too much there. Linux is a nice kernel, but when it came along the GNU project already had a usable user-land, and it was just a matter of time until it got a kernel. If Linus hadn't GPL'd Linux, serious development of HURD would have continued. If that still hadn't turned out, there would be other free software kernels. Linus' contribution was significant, but it's profoundly ignorant to claim that had he not made it, no one else in the entire world would have.
As far as his opinions on things like desktop environments, I've learned to tune him out. He's a great kernel hacker and all, but he has a tendency to be very brusque and very sure of himself in areas where he really doesn't know what he's talking about, and I don't see any particular reason we should care what he says about those areas.
Yeah let's just have everything stagnate and stay the same forever because poor lusers can't figure out the button moved 100 pixels and has a different icon. Wah wah wah.
What icon? You obviously haven't tried Gnome 3.
Since this is /. ...
Gnome 3 is like re-inventing the car - with no confusing dials on the dashboard, a rear view mirror that pops up when you lean to the left, and the gear shift in the glove box.
Vroom!
I agree about Win key.
The most annoying thing about OSX is the lack of OS specific keys. Periodically a new version of OSX will stomp on shortcuts used by Creative Suite and Quark.
In windows, and as time goes on, in Linux, the Windows key is reserved for the OS, so the apps can safely use control (and to a lesser extent ALT).
I like having 3 modifier keys, ALT manipulates current window, CTRL for commands to the program, WINDOWS for commands to the WM.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Not having used Gnome 3, I don't know what it does. Does it just default the shortcuts to use Windows, or does it not let you (or make it difficult) to change them?
The latter. In particular, hitting the windows key opens the "overview", which is the replacement for the Gnome menus combined with a type-to-search bar and tonnes of transparent eye candy. The alternative is to move your mouse to the top left corner of your leftmost monitor, and wait. I'm sure changing it is possible, but they sure hasn't made it easy. Nor provided sane defaults that doesn't require a 104/105-key keyboard.
The latter. In particular, hitting the windows key opens the "overview", which is the replacement for the Gnome menus combined with a type-to-search bar and tonnes of transparent eye candy. The alternative is to move your mouse to the top left corner of your leftmost monitor, and wait. I'm sure changing it is possible, but they sure hasn't made it easy.
Then that sucks.
Nor provided sane defaults that doesn't require a 104/105-key keyboard.
See, here is where we disagree: I think the win key is the sane default (provided you present a reasonable way to change it).
I may be biased by my window manager setup, but the way I view thing nowadays is that programs should get the ctrl, alt, and shift modifiers, and the WM should get shortcuts involving the Windows key.
In windows, and as time goes on, in Linux, the Windows key is reserved for the OS, so the apps can safely use control (and to a lesser extent ALT).
That's exactly how I view things too. (With the exception that I run a virtual desktop program and it gets some Windows key shortcuts. But I view that as not really an exception after all.)
I do the same thing as you, maybe except for your treatment of alt. The program gets that too under my setups.
Perhaps because linus is not interested in a window manager holy war, and just wants to "get shit done" in a sane and efficient manner. KDE used to allow this. Gnome used to allow this. When KDE4 came out, my workflows were broken to the extent that I couldn't be bothered spending the excessive amount of time required to get them back. I have not yet used Gnome 3, but I suspect Linus is in the same situation. When its easier and less painful to change to a competing desktop environment than it is to use the new version of your previous choice, something is seriously wrong.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I came to the same conclusion he did weeks ago when Unity pushed me over the edge; I'm smarter than Linus Torwalds, w00h000!
well, maybe my systems programming skills are a little suckier than his.....
I may be biased by my window manager setup, but the way I view thing nowadays is that programs should get the ctrl, alt, and shift modifiers, and the WM should get shortcuts involving the Windows key.
That tends to break when you run virtual machines or remote WMs. If the local WM intercepts the Windows/Super key, then the VM or remote WM won't get it.
(Of course, in Gnome 3 that is all academic, since you can't run Gnome shell in a VM nor remotely.)
...GNOME/KDE decided to become the DEs for the rest of us: environments that are more suitable to entertainment than actual work.
This is one thing I've never understood about Linux.
I've been in the sciences for a couple years and I use Linux for a lot of things. Even before that, I have dabbled with Linux on and off over the years. Mostly I use Windows for my personal desktop; it's not 100% stable, but neither is XFCE which I use on my work laptop (which is not a beefy laptop, so I wanted something lighter than Gnome or KDE).
It seems to be, though, that the hardcore Linux base obsesses over customization and work. That's great. But apparently, "customization" means that you have to edit simple things in obscure config files deep in system directions, and "work" means that it has to look like a desktop from 1991.
What is wrong with a desktop environment where everything is controllable with a GUI, and that GUI edits some config files in a system directory? What is wrong with a pretty desktop environment? If all we care about is "work", we might as well go back to using 256 colors.
Still not using on my main machine though.
Initially I was thrown because it is so different; personally I think it looks like unification with phone/tablet OS is the source of the changes (not copying MacOS as much as converging with iOS and Android).
But issues like launching a terminal window as mentioned in TFA when I actually took a hard look at how to solve them turned out to have simple solutions. eg type windows key to activate launcher, then type "terminal" (focus is automatically in search) - then enter - you can launch the terminal with out even having to use the mouse (or the multi-modifier gymnastics of ctl-shift-n), and I have to admit better than my gnome2 solution of of having the launcher in the panel. If I can get all my launching working this way (keyword conflicts may make for more typing that I like) then I would consider it a gain over navigating menus.
I'm still not entirely happy (what is with the giant title bars?! can be fixed with config hacking, but why have them at all?; what is that stupid dock/favourites thing good for, and no doubt many issues that will come when I upgrade my main box), but in view the above example I will reserve judgement until I have really tried it out. The issue that annoys me the most is actually the task switching that stacks up same app windows together (but I am aware that ballooning window counts is an issue that needs a solution).
Its news because when someone notable decided to criticize the crappy unholy mess that was CUPS administration, something actually got done about it. Now adays CUPS is still not perfect, but leaps and bounds better than the heaping pile (UI wise) than it was in years past.
Bye!
Over the years I have been something of a fan of Gnome (off and on since pre-1.0), but it often seems to me that each major version bump since takes more useful features away from the user, leaving behind some half-baked philosophical notion of how the developers think you "should" work in their place. This is why my desktop now takes a more composite form, with some of the old Gnome 2 components saddled along with compiz-fusion and other bits and pieces. Easily done when you use a rolling-release distro (Arch in my case).
To many people my desktop environment might seem a complete mess, but it works well enough for me at the moment.
This case is interesting, though, because in the past Linus has come out quite strongly in favour of KDE over Gnome. I guess anyone's perspective can change over time...
Actually for their time there were two desktop environments where I really had the feeling they go tit right.
OS/2 Warp back then was perfect for its time. It probably would not work out anymore today, but I think back then it was the best there was and felt simply right.
Snow Leopard so far to me has been the summit of perfect UI design. It felt about 90% right to me.
On the OSX Side Lion usabilitywise was a huge step backwards.
On Linux I think KDE 3.x and Gnome 2.x were about 80% right. KDE 4 still is around 80%, some things have improved while others got worse so it stands at the same level for me as 3.x used to stand, but I personally think that the auto fading widget controls are annoying, I want a desktop which is there for usage but does not remind me all the time that it is there.
The dealbreaker for me in Gnome 2 was always nautilus, from a power user point of view it always lacked compared to the kde counterparts and also lacked compared to the really old nautilus.
Is anyone here aware of the fact that KDE 3.5 still exists under the name Trinity Desktop Environment?
I had been using gnome since the 1.x days. By the time they hit 2.20 or something I was completely happy with it. Very simple and elegant but easily customizable in the things that actually matter. The default interface was so obvious thas even my parents could use it, yet powerful enough to be my main desktop at work.
I really really miss Gnome 2.32.
Then I tried the early betas of 3.0 on Arch linux. It sucked. I waited until the official release. I sucked even more. I still have version 3.0.2 installed and I give it a try from time to time, but I always end up using XFCE, which will stay my default desktop until I buy my first Mac.
Does somebody have an idea why a hardcore Linux guy would ever like to use a Windows/OSX lookalike? I think a plain window manager like Fluxbox makes much more sense. No panels to take up space and attention, just the application windows. Programs themselves can be launched from the command line, which I think is more convenient than managing a graphical menu, and I only have menu items for terminals and browsers.
To me, the great thing about computers is that they can handle much more data than what can be visible at a time. The problem with Windows/OSX style is trying to cram everything into one screen, while I prefer one virtual screen per task for better concentration.
I've been using Fluxbox for about 9 years, after first using Gnome and then Enlightenment for a while, so I've probably been after more minimalism all the time. Of course, there are still more minimal window managers, but none of them has really caught my attention. For example, tiling WMs are probably great for large screens, but I generally use a laptop and other smaller screens (again, one task per virtual screen for better concentration).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The point of having a desktop environment is to get work done quickly. I spent several years using KDE 2, then 3, and now 4 is counterintuitive & slows me down, so I switched to GNOME 2. Now I'm being told that it's going down the toilet too. This headlong rush for eye candy is probably going to appeal to Windows and Mac users, but longtime & loyal users like myself are being ignored. Someone pointed out that earlier iterations of GNOME and KDE aped Microsoft and the new ones are aping OSX.... As far as DEs go, I think Win2K's was the most efficient, and when I finally installed XP the first thing I did was enable the "classic" look. Does that make me a Luddite? **The purpose of an interface is to enable the user to get his work done as quickly as he can.** Get off my lawn!