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Ask Slashdot: Assembling a Linux Desktop Environment From Parts?
paxcoder writes "Gnome Shell ... is different. Very much so. The fallback was inadequate. I suspect that many people, like me, turned to the alternatives. My choice was LXDE, which worked ok, until (lx-)panel broke in the unstable branch of the distro that I use. Tired of using the terminal to run stuff, I replaced the standard panel with the one from Xfce. That made me realize that we really don't need a packaged desktop environment, there are pieces ready for assembly. If you customize your graphical environment, what elements do you use? Which window manager, file manager, panel(etc.) would you recommend? Do you have a panel with a hardware usage monitors, how do you switch between workspaces? Anything cool we might not know about?"
'Nuff said.
Please, no WAAA KDE IS BLOATED AND BROKEN AND INCOMPLETE AND THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER arguments because they've been proven wrong time and again.
It's sad that I have to post AC to defend KDE, currently one of the best desktops (okay, the best desktop) for GNU/Linux.
I prefer avant-window-navigator. the only downside is it needs compiz to look nice. by default it has an osx look and feel, but it can be customized and it does have hardware monitoring applets
Then find what works for you.
It works for me; but I have been using a computer for the better part of 13 years daily. For the last 10 more than 60 hours in a given week. So I have had time to see what I like and what I don't like.
I use xfce4 with gnome-terminal. I don't mind other terminal emulators but gnome-terminal is nice.
And thats about all the customization I do.... I don't want my WM to do anything "clever" if I want some application I'll install it directly....
Then again, thats why I run gentoo and not some prepackaged distro which decides what I want to run.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Openbox window manager, pcmanfm, feh for images and desktop background , htop for process monitor and uhhh that's it TaDaaaaa. Oh yeah for a little bling wbar dock !
I like cobbling together my own desktop too... sometimes. I have a family computer at home with KDE, but my own laptop uses ArchBang which is really Arch Linux with Openbox. Openbox is very sparse though and you can use your own menus, taskbar, system tray, etc. etc. etc. I like the control and I like finding out what's out there and trying new solutions to the Desktop 'problem'.
Yeah, how dare he try to use software that he likes! What a fucking asshole. Everyone knows that you just take whatever piece of shit Microsoft shoves down your throat and then you say "Thank you sir, may I have another?"
Back up a few steps. He's asking for suggestions on apps and configurations... how is that an "everybody else is wrong" mentality? You, on the other hand, are immediately leaping to the conclusion that HE is wrong.
It also sounds like he is experimenting just for his own personal use, not for creating a distro. His own personal configuration would hardly affect public perception of Linux.
Years ago I was a BlackBox user. I've always preferred low-impact WindowManagers and never jumped on the Evolution bandwagon. These days I use BlackBox's primary fork, FluxBox, on both my primary desktop and my "Netbook." The menu format is easy to work with and the memory footprint is negligible.
I don't use a file manager, but I do build most things with GNOME support (if proper), so Nautilus is kinda/sorta there. I'm also not a big panel user - I don't like having tachometers, usage monitors, or any extra stuff filling up my workspace. (I take minimalism to new lows.) Others will have to help you in those respects.
I dti'r na ndall is ri' fear na leathshu'ile.
question is too broad. There's gotta be a dozen variants of each tool you're looking for plus many more obscure or orphaned projects.
If you have unlimited time, anything is possible. But sometimes, it's just nice to be able to give the installer a few simple bits of information and come back 20 minutes later with a fully functioning system. That's just me whining though because once the damage is done, it leaves the users with little other option but to kludge something together. I just don't understand why perfectly good stuff gets ruined -- and it isn't just linux. Look at iCal in Lion compared to previous versions.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Wow, that's harsh. I don't see why you guys are ragging on him so much. Isn't this the point of linux? We do it our way, whatever that means? Personally I never went up to gnome 3, I use the shell as much as I can, and I often use AWESOMEWM. But I'm not one to fight with things, if it works I won't bother fixing it.
I used to do this: running everything in blackbox window manager with different panels and other launcher applications. I actually stuck with blackbox for a long time because I liked being able to edit the desktop window in a text file and open applications just by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing from a menu. I gave up on using other launchers and panel applications. I really liked the minimalism of black box.
Now, I'm using Unity with the Launcher on Ubuntu. I find it usable for the most part, and once you alter habits to work with its paradigm, it doesn't really hinder productivity.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Had the same problem as you. I removed all gnome packages. Now I'm using xdm, xfce4 with all plugins and extras, idesk, thunderbird (a.k.a icedove), terminator. After logging htop shows ~100MB memory usage!
I use Awesome WM. It's a tiling window manager, and it lives up to it's name! I use it both on ArchLinux and OpenSuse, and the stock configuration needs very little configuration to be perfectly useable. The configuration is written in Lua, so it takes a little time to master, but the amount of customization you can do is unbeatable. Screenshots
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
I have gotten very comfortable and efficient with my Gnome 2 setup over the years, and I recently switched to xfce. The setup is almost identical and I've been very happy. All I had to do was customize my panels and apt-get a few add-ons (like the Orage clock/calendar and system monitor). Xfce has come a long way since I last used it.
I dislike Gnome Shell too. I switched to XFCE, but Thunar is nearly unusable for what I need, so I am using Nautilus. It was not easy to switch, and it still takes 15-20 seconds to load Nautilus AFTER completing XFCE panel loading.
As for panel, I use a CPU/mem load meter, a desktop switcher (I use 10 of them), windows list, pomodoro applet, notification area and clock. I also have a "main menu" icon, but rarely use it, preferring gmrun bound to the Menu key on the keyboard. I do most of my work thru keybindings
Ubuntu got too heavy so now it's Lubuntu. Which is now an official fork, officially solving the problem of Ubuntu being too heavy :) Then if you just avoid installing anything that depends on Mono (use Rhythmbox and not Banshee, use the C++ port of gnote if you must, etc etc) then you avoid the worst cancers. As long as you use a Lubuntu session and don't load any GNOME apps then those libraries etc don't need to load.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How fortunate we are that this is not Facebook.
xcompmgr is a bit more stable than compiz in my experience, but it is much slower. but running awn it's not usually a big issue though.
cairo-dock / glx-dock is another one that has proven useful, and has slightly better hotkeys, but also has more bugs than awn.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
most places I've worked won't support Linux desktops and leave engineers on their own to do their own administration. My current place requires that I have a Linux desktop, but IT does not support it past the hardware.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I use openbox with xfce4-panel and a number of other odd programs (some I wrote, some from other environments, some standalone).
xfce4-panel is critical to my happiness because it handles multiple monitors very well (seperate panel for each window.. no glitches.. just works). This seems to be a feature lacking in a lot of panels/window managers.
I use dolphin for file browsing (I do most file management from a console but find dolphin is nice for browsing around my vast media collection).
I'm not an minimalist. I used kde3 for a long time and was happy with it (before that it was icewm). I like lots of clutter and silly apps that don't really do much. I've got lots of screen real estate (6 monitors) and usually have them plastered with all manner of stuff.
I use gkrellm for resource monitoring. I know.. kind of kiddie ish.. but I like that it can do remote monitoring. I have 5 "stacks" that monitor 5 different machines. 2 of those machines are only on periodically, so I wrote a patch that adds an option to gkrellm to display "offline" instead of going into alarm mode when a box disconnects.
I don't bother with desktop icons, but do use a homebrew app for desktop wallpaper. There are lots of wallpaper managers.. but I honestly couldn't find anything that did what I wanted. Everything was either too simple (and couldn't handle multiple monitors) or insanely over-complicated. Was easier to just whip up an app that randomly cycles through images in a directory than try to sort through all the options out there.
This one is gonna cost me some geek cred.. but I use... xchat! Used to use bitchx, than irssi (and still do occasionally).. but xchat is where it's at.
If you could be happy with a cobbled-together environment you still have to invest non-trivial amounts of time and effort in, why don't just install whatever ready-made environment comes along the way and be done with it? Chances are that it is better, smoother, prettier and more capable than what you can get together by yourself with reasonable effort.
Or start out with FVWM, Gkrellm and a bunch of terminal windows. Or go nostalgic and get a copy of OL(V)WM and all the old SunOS/OpenView desktop stuff to go along with it. There are long days and nights waiting to be wasted on that, believe me. I did all of that 10 or 15 years ago and today I miss nothing of it.
Don't waste your time on solving problems that were already solved in a thousand ways 10 years ago. If you're serious try to develop your own DE which is really *NEW* and not another bad copy of Windows95 or CDE or NeXTstep. Windows with a title and a frame and buttons in the title and a desktop with icons on it and a panel with a bar of window titles on the top or bottom of the desktop are so *boring*.
Since I don't mind fiddling with things to get my environment working the way I like, I have had great success with wmii, a tiling window manager which uses a very accessible runtime interface to allow for all sorts of scripting in a variety of languages. The normal usage of this sort of window manager is to use key commands to launch your apps. When windows get created they are automatically arranged either using scripted setups (like to arrange all of the sub-windows in GIMP) or to a default space where you can move them around, once again, using your keyboard. Development versions of wmii have a built-in dock which integrates into the information bar.
I. Do. Not. Get. It.
It is beyond me why people want to emulate the clutter they have on their physical desk, on their computer.
One does not need a "Desktop Environment".
What I want is a window manager that allows me to set the only sane focus policy (focus follows mouse, click to raise), maintains the user experience and config-file compatibility from release to release and otherwise stays out of the way. Not having to choose between 42 different plugins/extensions/addons and whatnot is also a good thing.
A couple of years ago (*cough*) when IBM killed OS/2, I made the transition to Linux. I soon landed on icewm as my preferred window manager, as it had a "OS/2 Warp" theme. I believe I at one time played with a Presentation Manager-like desktop, but I soon realized it was more hassle than benefit.
icewm has a fully configurable "context-menu" on the entire desktop background (right-click mouse for *your* selection of files, programs, folders, etc), ditto menu for windows (left click), configurable hotkeys (I hit F12 for a terminal), a toolbar with the regular stuff, workspaces and so on.
And for any newbie out there: not running gnome or kde or whatever does not prevent you from launching gnome or kde programs.
Now, please tell me again about the added benefits of having a zillion garish icons on your desktop background?
Or, by the way... don't bother,...
Dag B
That made me realize that we really don't need a packaged desktop environment, there are pieces ready for assembly.
This used to be the Unix Philosophy, before someone decided that it would be really cool to force everyone to use your own specific applications rather than building independent apps and window managers with some kind of standardised communications for anything that needed two apps to talk to each other. If developers had stuck with that I'd be able to run KDE apps in Gnome without crashing or having to continually click 'Oh my God, KBollockManager is not running' dialog boxes.
Why they did this, I don't know. I guess they decided it was easier and shinier to build everything from scratch than to negotiate with other developers so that their apps would interoperate easily.
I've put my own DE together with FVWM2, which is pretty much designed for that sort of thing. It has the ability to take Perl scripting for almost every feature you want, and works well with integrating services to the DE. I've been able to create dynamic menus from it, with button options for other activities (ex, listing and acting on mail, for one; also, popping up new dynamic DEs based on nagios messages for host troubleshooting, complete with relevant schematic on the root window, etc). The great thing about it is that you can program in the behavior of pretty much any other desktop feature you want, mixing Windowmaker features with XFCE, etc. Plenty of apps out there will work with it as well.
Last time I used that, I was using compiz, avant-window-manager and gDeslets. I used nautilus as filemanager, but keep in mind this was in the gnome2 days where all you needed was to lauch gnome-settings-daemon and you was set. At this day and age, I use a customized kubuntu, and plasma makes very easy to move stuff around the way I like to do, kwin is working great in 4.7.6 as window manage. The only complaints I got is kopete protocol stability (only recently msn got back to working for me) and lack of a descent SIP phone, so I got to use ekiga for that. I always used thunderbird as mail client and that's unlikely to change since it is mostly desktop-safe, same for chrome (konqueror or rekonq are still too slow;/buggy for general usage)
Thats my 0.02 brazilian cents
sign(c14n(envelop(this)), x509)
(one more time, but logged in) I came to the same conclusion last spring. I'm on arch linux and my desktop is as follows: Window Manager: Compiz (though this could easily be openbox if you don't want the shiny... I keep it for the window management plugins) Panel: tint2 (when I last looked it didn't really support multiple viewports in compiz well so I patched in the support (they're hesitant to officially add support)) Launcher: Kupfer (I don't really like menus) System Info: conky File Browser: pcmanfm Editor: vim I use xautolock to lock my screen (via slock), and suspend my PC. I don't currently use a login manager, as it is easy enough to "startx" when I want a graphical session. Switching between viewports (compiz only has one "workspace") is done in the normal way. I also use the put and grid plugins to rearrange windows via the keyboard. The system was originally based on a lxde desktop so lxsession manages auto-starting programs. The nice thing about rolling your own desktop environment is that you can switch out parts as you like. I've specifically chosen these apps to avoid installing a majority of the gnome/kde subsystems. This keeps my system quick to boot even on four year old hardware. Finally: if you don't want your panels breaking then stay off of the unstable branch.
WMX
http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wmx/
Features:
- Lightweight (size measured in Kb, not Mb)
- Unobtrusive. Uncluttered appereance (we need no friggin' icons on our desktop)
- Left-side titlebar preserves space on wide-screen displays
- Multiple desktops
- Root menu for quick launch of applications (just put scripts/symlinks in a directory, the contens will be displayed as a menu)
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
IMO, I think that a linux user trying to cobble together unstable releases of DE software would consider attempting to fix the software that one likes - I'd make a safe wager that most of one's problems stem from configuration issues. I say that because with my 4 years of limited experience with the linux desktop, I spent plenty of time distro/DE-hopping to find a remedy to having to edit default settings to get usability to the point were I like it. Then I learned that not all software is created equal, and not a single developer out there has the ability to read my mind. I tend to find - in my limited experience - that linux software tends to not "break", but is simply mis-configured for my unique situation by default.
Recently I've been using the XMonad window manager with the XMobar status bar. Both are written in Haskell and are extremely minimal. XMonad is tiling so it's a joy to use on a laptop as you never need to use the mouse.
slim+fluxbox, no panels. lots of conky instances for monitoring EVERYTHING in the house.
There you are, staring at me again.
It's good people are noticing that the Linux desktop is largely going to hell, being destroyed by developers ignorant of user needs working in a vacuum. It's good people want to come up with solutions to giving the user control of workflow and configuration. Things were looking bleak.
TL:DR https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=131196 read the information below the screenshots and take your pick! Your realization is what people were doing for many years now.
The answer is clear, if you want a complete "build it yourself" distribution, with parts hand choosen, just go for one of the command line interface based distributions, such as Arch or Gentoo, which come with a bare system.
F.e by just following Arch Linux' wiki for system installation you will get familiar with all the WM/DE choices, and depending on what you pick there you can get further specific information on the Arch wiki or specific WM, regarding systray/pager/filemanager and other utilities that work well there.
I for one have openbox with tint2, conky and pypanel, with thunar as filemanager (although I often just use coreutils when it's faster/easier). Of course, no one is forcing you to choose Arch or Gentoo, Ubuntu is fine but to me it makes no sense to choose a GUI distribution which comes hand polished for GNOME/KDE/*DE usage when you will just clean it all and install ratpoison.
I think everyone does this to some extent although with my laptop being about 9 years old I try to keep it low on resources as possible. My system has Lubuntu as the baseline, Clementine for music, Picasa via Wine for photo control & editing, Opera for the browser & RSS feed, and Dolphin for the file manager. I used PCmanFM for a time but the split screen is a killer feature for me, even with it requiring Nepomuk for some god only knows reason. My only real complaint is Samba is STILL borked on Lubuntu which eliminates my access to the server.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I've been using crunchbang openbox (debian base) for the longest time, but just recently switched to arch out of frustration with some of the debian wheezy issues right now. I'm still using the same setup for the most part though, openbox with some xfce apps and other stuff. Thunar file manager, terminator or urxvt terminal emulator, tint2 pannel (which I never use really), nitrogen for setting wall paper, and conky for system monitoring. A lot of that stuff you could replace with other apps, but two of those things which I can't live without anymore are terminator and conky. Terminator is great because of it's built in tiling functions (I really don't need tiled media player and browser windows) and conky is the most configurable system monitor out there. The openbbox rc.xml file is really easy to configure and once you set up your hotkeys to your liking, you find yourself not even needing the GUI or a mouse to swith between windows, open applications, resize windows etc. If you wanna try this setup with minimal hassle, you can check out the crunchbang distro from a live CD, it's debian stable based though which might not be your thing.
WM: Fluxbox and backgrounds with feh.
FM: ROX-Filer, BASH
Audio: ALSA
Multimedia: MPlayer, SMPlayer, Audacious and Geeqie.
Messaging: Pidgin or irssi with irssi-xmpp plugin.
Photo editing: ufraw and GIMP.
WWW: Iceweasel(Firefox) and Chromium.
And no need to take part in DM fights :)
I don't have a strong feeling about any window manager these days, although KDE4 is more stable than ever, and TDE is very fast, stable and nostalgic. I prefer gkrellm somewhere on my desktop as a habit more than anything else. It helps me to keep an eye on the network and CPU usage (boinc runs continuously in the background, and sometimes a virtual machine too), as well as temperature readings.
I just started building my own a few months ago and I'm pretty happy with the following:
Arch linux - has my favourite package manager (pacman + yaourt)
Xmonad window manager - tiling wm that doesn't get in the way, with some minor configurations
Stalonetray - has a clock (trayclock), sound (pnmixer), battery indicator (qbat), dropbox, etc.
ranger - vi-like file browser which is simple to use, runs in a terminal (urxvt), and I keep a regular filebrowser (nautilus) around just in case something needs me to drag-and-drop something.
non-visual things:
udiskie - automount usb drives and things
It's a very simple setup, though there are more things than what is mentioned here, and I love it. :)
A list of programs which I am currently using and why is here: https://github.com/MattWoelk/configuration-files/blob/master/home/matt/programs.txt Enjoy!
So we have an aspie here who would admittedly and uncompromisingly rather use an unstable mess of cobbed-together parts(including the distro itself), because that's the way baby likes it and everybody else is wrong.
That mentality is everything that's wrong with fostering acceptance of the Linux desktop.
It's Linux, you can have it the way you want it. When he gets up tomorrow morning he will have a desktop that he likes. And you'll still be a flaming asshole.
Fluxbox, just like Openbox, Blackbox and Afterstep has a dock/wharf/slit. Back in the day. Taking 68 pixles away from the right hand side of the screen was expensive on a 640x480 or 1024x768. However with the modern 16:9 aspect ratio 1366x768 can easily afford to give up 68 pixels for the slit region. My ideal setup is image
Lightweight and fast.
vi +
There seems to be a lot of confusion about desktop environments. Adding a panel to a a window manager is not a true desktop environment. Desktop environments provide other services besides the ability to launch an application. Xfce, Gnome, KDE are desktop environments. Openbox, Fluxbox, etc. are window managers. While one can make a window manager look visually like a desktop environment, without the other services, it is not.
As an example, you can take Xfce, a desktop, and replace the window manager (xfwm) with openbox and you still have a desktop environment, because the window manager is only one piece of it.
While all desktop environments include a window manager, no window manager is a desktop environment. You can add all of the components on services to make your own desktop environment, however, that still doesn't make the window manager (or panel) the desktop environment.
Think of it like an automobile is a desktop environment. It is a complete package. You can swap parts out (tires, engine, transmission), but none of these parts is the automobile. You can even start with a plain chasis and add everything else custom the way you want. That is what happens when you take a window manager and start adding your own panels and services. Just as at some point your project car becomes a complete automobile, so to will your efforts lead to a complete desktop environment. But until that occurs, all you have is a bunch of parts.
Alright, well definitely felt the same sentiment.
I'm running debian wheezy (which used to be debian stable)
built from a net install. The only gnome stuff I've left is the
gnome games package, gdm3, and gvfs.
I have to admit I'm glad gnome 3 came around because I got to try something different,
as for my issues with the gui changes, I've switched to using a lot of cli apps (which ironically
I've had less trouble customizing things like color, I don't have to worry about #000 text on a #000 background
because I get to change the palette...)
Graphical Stuff
For the Window manager, awesome wm, frankly I don't care for LUA that much, but I've customized my rc.lua a bit,
because awesome is frankly just too awesome.
Browser: uzbl (with squid3 for cache, and privoxy for ad filtering and other goodies.)
Office stuff: duh LibreOffice
File Manager: Thunar
Music Player: Audacious or Deadbeef
Cli Stuff (yes I know some of these apps provide a graphical version too, take your pick)
Now for the fun stuff
Terminal Emulator
urxvt
Terminal Multiplexor
Gnu Screen
I love gnu screen, if you don't like it, I've heard tmux is great.
I cannot imagine using cli apps with out it now...
Elinks
Fantastic Web browser with a great text user interface, menus, and everything.
Writing this post within it (well actually pressing ctrl + t brings the editor I chose which is...)
Vim
Yes, I did switch to it (no more nano, gedit, or well there is another editor, but shhh shhh... Be quiet!)
Vim is fantastic, love the spell checker, great for working with multiple languages,
I use it more for writing than coding (usually simple bash stuff or messing with a stylesheet or something.)
Midnight Commander
Great file manager for cli
Mail
Alpine, yes I know... So damn easy to set up though.
IRC/Chat
Weechat and sometimes finch
News feeds
Newsbeuter
File downloads
wget, it has always worked well for me, and continues to do so.
CD ripping
abcde
Video
Mplayer and vlc
Music
mocp and weird stuff like adplay (for adlib stuff...)
Somethings I run at start up in my xsession are autocutsel (to make clipboard handling sane),
xinput for configuring my touchpad scroll,
and setxkbmap so I can toggle language layouts with a hotkey
I guess that's about it, running on a nearly 6 year old laptop, and it flies since this stuff is so light weight.
The advantage is I can have nearly the same setup on any sort of PC and it should run just fine. And no worries
for the license types, all these goodies are FOSS. Have fun, and use your system how you want to use it.
I have been using fvwm for I guess almost 20 years now. During the time I tried a number of other window managers, and even several of those so called desktop environments, and I always end up returning to fvwm. You can configure it to do pretty much anything you want. I have my own vi based set of keybinding, minimal eye-candy (plain flat title bar on windows, simple frame,no 3d, no gradients). It may not be shiny and pretty, but it works.
In addition to that,I use stalonetray for tray icons, gkrellm for hardware monitoring, volume control etc, and dmenu for launching programs.
I do not use a taskbar, I tried several of them, but eventually I came to a conclusion that they just take space on the screen, and don't serve any useful need. I have fvwm show window list menu on rightclick in the root window, and also have a keybinding for that, but I very rarely use it.
AccountKiller
The enlightenment, dr17, is one of the finest, nicest and fastest DEs around. It's built using its own sets of libraries (the EFL libs) and it's currently in BETA state. Even when it's being heavily developed, I've been using it for the last 4 years as a main desktop and it has always been very stable (even more than the first KDE 4.x releases!)
I salt it with some QT apps (dolphin, konsole, gwenview, kate, etc) for MY perfect Desktop =)
with compiz, avant-window-navigator (docky is probably fine too and it has that useful effect of _really_ zooming dock icons when you hover the mouse above, which I can't find in AWN) - while it's theoretically dependent on compiz, since XFCE's compositor reached mature level, all you actually need is xfwm, though eye candy's not complete, but I guess that's not your priority anyway. As a long time XFCE user, I still kept Gnome's evince, sometimes gedit (for quick point'n'click in file manager, for everything else there's vim anyway) or file-roller. I have quite strong allergy to pretty much every DE supplied music/movie player I've ran into, so Audacious and MPlayer it is. Switching workplaces is customizable, left click at the edge of screen to get to the next one or middle clicking desktop and dragging or rotating the mousewheel worked for me.
Also - don't take it too far with jigsaw puzzle approach, in my experience it's still better to have something as a base with replacing parts you dislike than completely DIY mess.
Oh, and all this ran on Ubuntu, then Debian (currently 64-bit Wheezy), and at the moment looks like this.
This setup's of course just a result of my preferences and idiosyncrasies and far from perfect, but it bugs me less than others I've tried.
Troll 2.0 Fear my asocial networking!
Yep, and if they did support it, they would have a standard build. You probably wouldn't have the ability to customize much at all and would have updates pushed to you from whatever patch management system they use. I don't understand why anyone would even attempt to use that argument, if you use a system in a corporate environment, it isn't just for security reasons that they have a standard build, it is for ease of updates and support.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
As long as it stays stable, I will stay with xfce4. I need my computer to be...predictable. Gnome desktop is no longer predictable.
I use openbox, conky and a keyboard shortcut to open a terminal. That's my "desktop environment". If you absolutely need icons to open programs, then get one of the countless little dock apps you can find out there, like wbar.
I use i3-wm on everything now, the tiling is great on the desktop and the tabbing is awesome on my cute little netbook. Combine that with dmenu to start stuff and keybindings for firefox and thunderbird and I'm happy.
:)
Combine i3 with dmenu and a nice light terminal emulator like urxvt or xterm and you've made me feel at home
Another really nice low-impact WM from the old days. I do wish the root menu supported XDG system menus natively, but add some good dockapps and you get a really nice setup.
I'm using XFCE with Nautilus as file manager and desktop on Ubuntu. It took me a couple hours to work out the kinks of using Nautilus as the desktop. If I recall, it was a bit tricky to get the nautilus desktop "on top." I think I deleted /usr/bin/{whatever XFCE desktop is called} and made a startup script to start nautilus as the desktop.
I don't like this setup as much as Gnome 2, but it's a million times better than Gnome 3 or Unity. I never could get into KDE.
1) WindowMaker - Very fast, very clean, very neat. Like the WM Dockapps a lot, look very neat. Let's not forget, its anchestor 'NextStep' was designed under the ruling 'Iron Fist of Design and Usability' (TM) Steve Jobs. Even in the well-aged FOSS rippoff it shows.
2) Fluxbox - The hip and hype Linux Pro WM of the last decade. Had it's hype-highpoint around about 2005 and has since joined the grand hall of eternal Linux WMs. Very nice. The fist simple-style WM I saw with anti-aliased Fonts. Think 'modern WindowMaker' with some neat toolbar stuff, tabbed windows that can be stacked by easy drag and drop, nice shortcut defaults, easy to configure and very fast.
3) Enlightenment. If you're going to take your time configging and setup up your homebuilt Desktop setup, you should definitely take a good look at E. Tons of very neat stuff, very powerfull and very fast. E17 has been in development for a decade, the codebase is rock solid and is the avantgarde of desktop stuff to this very day. Fun fact: Quite a few things in Mac OS X are inspired by E - E is the darling child of any professional desktop developer.
4) 'Big' desktop environments: Since you want to build your setup 'from scratch' I see no point in getting a comparatively bloated preconfectioned package like KDE or Gnome. Since you'll be spending time checking out config files and such and will build the system to your specific needs, might aswell stick to systems that were built to be configured with textfiles, like the above mentioned. However, if you want the full package, I strongly suggest KDE. Gnome, in my opinion, only makes sense/is bearable when it comes with the work done for you, such as in the default Ubuntu distribution. ... Ubuntu is the only system where I bother using Gnome, simply because it's good enough, preconfigured and the nautilus file manager finally stopped sucking like a vacuum around about Ubuntu 8 or so.
But since that's not what you asked for, I suggest you look into the first three WM, Fluxbox and E and chose the one you like the best. :-)
And good luck going back into manual xorg.configging. One of the things I really don't miss about Linux desktops - especially since I'm using Ubuntu and Mac OS X.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm with you, more or less. I've used them all. I remember being very productive with pwm about a decade ago. I use Mac OS X at home, but at work, Linux, and I've settled into a nice configuration of fvwm, mostly emulating Xmonad by way of keybindings, with a little xmobar at the top of the screen. It took a small amount of scripting to get the current window title up there and the current "workspace" but now everything is put together and seems to be working well and I'm very seldom tempted to run back to KDE or GNOME.
I've tried a bunch of stuff recently, and keep coming back to KDE simply because I haven't found anything nearly as awesome as krunner.
Thread is useless without pictures! ;)
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
I also use E16, for about 12 years now. Also on Gentoo.
...a flaming asshole with a working system I can demonstrate to my non-techie friends without leaving them scratching their heads.
You'll understand, someday, when you're "the smart one" out of all of your friends and family and they're always bugging you because their Windows systems are crashing and running slow.
I've converted 5 hopeless non-techies and some of their parents already, and they kiss my feet on a daily basis for it.
After years of attempting to convert friends and family to use linux and trying to support their linux (rarely) and/or windows (often) systems, I am now smart enough to tell people to use whatever they want and to get tech support from the company they bought the system and/or software from. Except my wife, who laughs at me when I say that and makes me fix her stupid windows laptop anyway.
All that aside, I'm enjoying the ideas here, as I am constantly tinkering with my (main) system (currently xubuntu oneiric with xfce, razor-qt, openbox, e17, and kde4 available as options in lightdm). The tinkering is as much fun to me as the using, so I'm happy.
WALSTIB!
Word... E16 was pretty much my favorite desktop, and one of the few compositing window managers that also supported active thumbnails for my virtual desktops
(The little displays along the bottom left )
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/pictures/misc/Screenshot-enlightenome.png
I didn't hate gnome that much, though... still like creating a minimalist panel for notifications and a handful of quicklaunch apps/drawers.
Also I'm a sucker for composited translucent gnome-terminals
I love having gkrellm on the side for all of my system stats. But I'm also one of those people who get annoyed/nervous when I can't hear my hard disk heads seek under load.
Nowadays, I sort of use compiz-fusion, and maybe sometimes cairo-dock, but I don't really like it as much. But it's also more configurable and better maintained (e16 had some compositing artifacts with full-screen windows)
You mean the "I want to do things the way it suits me, you use whatever suits you" attitude? What's wrong with that?
I written wmjump some time ago, for switching between workspaces and applications. Here it is: http://code.google.com/p/wmjump/ This uses ``hints'' similar to Vimperator's. If I had more time, I would maintain it more often. But it works, more or less, on all window managers which support EWMH. I use it myself (with xmonad), and I still think that this is the best format for switching windows.
A simple WM that gives you a textfile .rc configuration, and the ability to launch a terminal when you want is all you really need. Need firefox? try "firefox &". Who needs a file manager? Why have a goofball hardware applet when you could run xload? (Again, from one of several terminals you have open).
Are we that much more productive compared with running TWM 20 years ago because we have accelerated transparent windows, or a recycle bin, or themable windows title bars?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
My choice was LXDE, which worked ok, until (lx-)panel broke in the unstable branch of the distro that I use.
You are using an unstable branch, why would you expect _anything_ to work? If stability is something you find important, stick with stable releases!
Tired of using the terminal to run stuff, I replaced the standard panel with the one from Xfce. That made me realize that we really don't need a packaged desktop environment, there are pieces ready for assembly. If you customize your graphical environment, what elements do you use?
True, but you need to look at trade offs. Parts and pieces you put together gets you to the same place you were with an unstable branching. If you want stable, why are you not using a stable release and stable package set?
Which window manager, file manager, panel(etc.) would you recommend? Do you have a panel with a hardware usage monitors, how do you switch between workspaces?
For the window manager I use KDE, Stable releases only. I need my systems to work all of the time every time. I have bells and whistles when I want to show off Linux to the ignorant, but turn them off when I need to actually work. It's always worked and I don't have to worry about them re-arranging things to make it look like the latest M$ product as some windows managers do. KDE provides me options to look like others, but I'm not being force fed "their way. I set up my tool bar, my quick launch buttons, put button placement where I want, and whallah I can work for years without worry.
File manager? People use those in Linux? The terminal is the best file manager ever, and I stick with that.
Graphical panel with usage monitors? No, but I don't need to either. It's my servers and workstations I work on. I know what the disk use is, and I know what the memory use is. If I'm testing code I run text based tools to figure out what's wrong, outside of kgdb or xgdb.
To me the moral of the story is that I found what I needed and stuck with it. The more you play with things the more they tend to break, I'm sure your mom warned you about something similar. :)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Doesn't aterm have problems with unicode? I seem to recall that I had to ditch it for eterm, and eventually for rxvt-unicode because of that - but maybe it has improved in past few years...
I'm using WindowMaker with some GNOME components.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I changed from Gnome2 to Openbox, because I don't want to have any Lennartware on my system anymore. I deselected every kind of crap Lennart made and now... I'm somehow happy, although, I would like to have a nicer file manager that cooperates with automounter instead of any HAL shit. (Btw, don't tell me about udev... I'm using FreeBSD and not Linux.)
Here my desktop:
My fav applications:
Doesn't aterm have problems with unicode? I seem to recall that I had to ditch it for eterm, and eventually for rxvt-unicode because of that - but maybe it has improved in past few years...
Hmmmm...that certainly would explain the odd characters I see in the "xinput -list" output. Point taken. Something for me to tuck away in a wiki for when I really need to use something Unicode in a term. TY!
Or...just run several, and use each when appropriate...it's not like we have gigantic amounts of storage in everything these days, or anything.
I love having gkrellm on the side for all of my system stats. But I'm also one of those people who get annoyed/nervous when I can't hear my hard disk heads seek under load.
Yeah, one of the old-school bennies of a 10K-spin Raptor is that I can hear when my bloody Winders partition needs a defrag.
Nice SS! I also have a few gkrellms (1 local box, 1 server). What's your E16 theme? I've tried them all, but keep coming back to Blue Steel.
Which brings up a disclaimer: E16 by default is butt ugly! But it was fairly easy to make all purdy and to my liking.
In biology they call it incest.
It's from the same 'culture' that prescribes password changes every 30 days.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Hi!
Like trying out each desktop and window manager without making a mess on our installed Linux installation?
Thank you in advance. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've been using Openbox with bmpanel2 for a long time, but after yesterday's article here I dropped bmpanel2 for Razor-qt. And then I have top and a shell running transparent on my desktop. Everything else I just use the KDE suite for though, I like their apps, I just don't like the bloat of the full desktop.
I've moved back to WindowMaker. I've complemented this with some of the utilities from Rox-Desktop, such as roxterm and roxfiler, largely because they work well and avoid Gnome/KDE dependencies and often enough, Dbus as well.
I wish WindowMaker was scriptable in Lua, or had more features. However, it is ICCWM compliant and has a wide number of features (I might have even put some in there... its hard to recall).
I've been using Windowmaker for about 8 years now. Love it. Fast. Lightweight. Easily customized. Has had virtual desktops for years. Just a lot easier and more sensible.
The people in this thread need to step back and evaluate their priorities. It's a *window manager*. It allows you to move windows around so that you can do what you're supposed to do with a computer, which is *use applications*.
From experience, Gnome 3 does an extremely effective job of allowing you to manage windows, while getting out of you way so you can actually get things done. What's more, it has an easy-to-use interface for opening applications and configuring system settings, and it's visually elegant.
Gnome 3 is intended to be better than Gnome 2, and it is; you just have to give it a chance. Stop being so self-righteously petty.
I use a tiling window manager i3-wm with xorg-xserver and tmux/screen when xserver is not running. I use lightweight applications. Also I disable all unnecessary processes to make it the most lightweight.
Lubuntu is tops ...
Personally I like Openbox. I've hopped around alot, and it's the most stable, works better than most with keystrokes-for-everything and is really easy to keep a few config files to recreate the setup each install. It also can be very beautiful and responsive - I get frustrated whenever I have to wait for another WM/DE to do stuff even on fast computers.
I used to roll my own following the Arch wiki with tint (later tint2) and pcmanfm, conky and some custom menu scripts. Then I found crunchbang, and they already have everything done for you and more, so now I start with that and add my own configs and menus to each install. Beautiful.
Archbang's also a great starting point.
However, as the DE vs. WM comments will point out, you will eventually come up against something that you never knew the DEs did for you that a WM does not - for example installing a new email program and finding that links don't work properly, etc.
In regards to some of the other comments - many are from people who spend all their time in a terminal or text-file - tilewm? xmonad? Awesome? Sure it's awesome if you're a full-time coder - just look at the screenshots. See anything but tiled terminals? Oh yeah, there's one with a floating firefox. There is a reason for this. If you ever have more than one mouse-based app open at a time you'll get real tired real quick. ...On the other hand you can learn to use screen with terminator and get the best of both worlds...
To continue your car analogy as seriously as I can, a window manager plus an iconic launcher makes a perfectly functional car. It's got all the mod cons to get you from place to place and to do it comfortably and flexibly. What it doesn't have is frills nor learner-driver support. It doesn't have a beeper telling you that your lights are on when you open the door. It doesn't have a GPS to help you get around the country, because you know, most people know where they're driving on most trips, or else they have a road map or perhaps an independent GPS unit. These are totally optional extras needed only by a few.
In contrast, a typical Linux desktop like KDE or Gnome goes far beyond the already fully functional graphical computer made from a window manager plus an iconic launcher, by adding a ton of graphic frills and learner-driver support. This is cool, as lots of people like frills (especially eye candy) and there are lots of new users who benefit greatly from learner support. It should not be denigrated, just recognized as optional frills plus support features which aren't required by people who know what they're doing and who prefer an efficient uncluttered platform.
As car analogies go, this one is not unreasonable. It's easy to imagine perfectly functional but undecorated cars, and it's also easy to imagine cars with extensive new-driver support, and in the extreme there's also the "car" that has so many decorations that it's more of a carnival float than a purpose-built utilitarian vehicle. But hey, some people actually like bling, and some people need a helping hand, so that's cool.
Each to their own. We don't all drive the same kind of car.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Yeah, hopefully gkrellm gets sound effects someday, so I can tell when my SSD is up to something :-P It's also neat hearing my cooling fans spin up when my CPU/GPU is loaded.
The e16 theme was one of the NeXTStep-ish ones that came with the Debian/Ubuntu enlightenment themes package... will try to look it up when I get home. I actually like light-on-dark themes, so I made an amateurish attempt to customize it:
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/pictures/misc/Screenshot-enlightenome_dark.png
Unfortunately, I dorked something up so irrevocably that I somehow permanently broke e16, and ended up migrating to compiz-fusion soon after :-/ I miss having different desktop backgrounds on each virtual desktop, though.
I really wish someone would update WindowMaker with compositing and other modern features... I really loved the desktop/workspace paradigm, and the workspace-sensitive clip. It was also dirt-simple to make nice-looking customized themes for.
I also give instructions on setting up the same desktop in a blog post: http://certainthought.blogspot.com/2011/07/simple-linux-desktop.html
The Penguin Producer
And if you want something even simpler that uses straight C, look at dwm. Actually, Awesome was forked from dwm. With dwm, the configuration is a C source file, so you have to rebuild it every time you make a change.
dwm is very minimal. For one, the notification area is actually the root window's title, so you have to use xsetroot in your .xinitrc to customize it. There's no included support for graphical tray icons.
The tradeoff is convenient features for speed and reliability. dwm is about 2000 SLoC. It's blazing fast. There is no lag whatsoever.
If you want to use dwm, really the true way to do it is to get the source and build it. You can get pre-built binaries, but dwm is all about customization.
I use dwm on a laptop with a 15" wide-ratio screen. It's tiling nature is the best way to most efficiently use the screen space, IMHO. However, it also includes a fullscreen window mode and a floating window mode.
Here are some screenshots.
I am using sawfish and ROX for over 15 years. I wouldn't change it for anything else. Even though my wife & sister & friends went through various generations KDE, gnome, unity and I learned how to use them (just for the sake of helping them). Still sawfish is the MOST powerful & fastest wm ever. And rox the lightest fm.
Imagine, that in sawfish you can even UNDO window actions (movement, resize, anything else). Assign different window properties per window type. You cannot even imagine how configurable are the keyboard shortcuts. No really. You. Can't. Imagine. Want have a totally mouseless workflow in multitude of opened windows? no problem. Want tablet? No problem. Window tabbing & windows taling are the BASICS. Not some advance features. I haven't seen tabbing in any of those popular wms, like kwin or metacity.
There is no way I would even seriously consider any other wm than sawfish.
why rox? There's nothing lighter that gives me icons, a desktop and panels. My 8 cores and 32 GB of ram are better spent elsewhere than on clumsy desktop environment. I am running dozen of simultaneous calculations almost all memory is used, and sawfish is still as responsive as if there was nothing clogging the cores. I never stop to be amazed at that. Especially when I look at other people's PCs when they open just a few apps, and their desktop becomes so unresponsive that I would get mad.
This comfort also made me a little lazy to "clean up" my desktops. I have 24 viewports, they are all full of windows - betweeen 100 and 200 windows open (I guess about 150 right now). And they get dusty. After few months I discover some forgotten window on some viewport and it brings nice memories about what I was doing back then.
Can you have that experience with your environment?
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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"windows taling are the BASICS"
-> I meant window tiling.
and LOL, I misspelled the name of my favorite wm in the title. it is SAWFISH. heh
also I configured UPS with tuxonice hibernate to preserve calculations that are running right now. That also helps uptime and making opened stuff dusty :)
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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they kiss my feet on a daily basis for it
You should hear what they say about you behind your back.
Install openbox and figure out how to make it work acceptably. By the time you're happy you will have also installed several panels (tint2, pypanel, cairo-dock), as well as other things to take up space (err make life easier?). Good for satisfying an itch for exploration, though I can't find a way to replace KDE.
Also running stumpwm on my laptop (rarely bring a mouse with me). I have 1 desktop for current-running stuff (firefox mostly) and another with a conky script, a kden2 script and an xfce4-terminal running tmux. My e-mail, rss reader, todo list, etc live in a tmux session on my server, so I can access that stuff from anywhere.
They're mental bloat. I like my environment to stick to business, and be snappy, minimalist and light. I don't want even a 0.1 second delay between mashing a button and the response. 3D effects slow things down.
I especially don't want the cute animations no matter how fast the computer and graphics are. What do 3D effects and animations tell you that you don't already know? You watch your desktops be rendered on a spinning cube during a switch if that's what turns you on. Me, I just want it to switch. Instant switch, no fuss. I can bounce back and forth far quicker that way. Can be useful for comparing two windows. Most of the feedback animations provide is distracting, or at best merely useless. Animations are the blinking text of the GUI world. If they could figure out useful things to say with animations, I'd embrace them.
I use LXDE right now. On low end computers, such as my aging Asus eee 901, turning off the font hinting and anti-aliasing gives a noticeable boost in performance. The main menu comes up just a little faster. Of course the default fonts look horrible without that, but if I change to fixed (or terminal, or maybe monospace), it looks fine.
I also use Adblock to cut down on all the annoying flashing and animation advertisers love to splatter all over websites. Haven't accomplished much with a minimalist desktop environment if a bad website can ruin it. I'm glad Mozilla has figured out that screen space is valuable, and dumped the status bar in Firefox for a nice little popup triggered by hovering over a link, and added the option to hide the menu bar. Used to use add-ons for that, now I don't have to.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
knowing your security situation is an important step in security. an environment with no control or auditing means that the shifting sands of personal system configuration result in a very poor understanding of the current company-wide situation.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
and I love it, I use pcmanfm as filemanager and some lx components for casual adjustment like lxinput/lxtask. http://awesome.naquadah.org/
Next time around, I'm going 100% KDE. Not everything in KDE is best of breed, but I'd rather have tools that were designed to work together.
Why wait for "next time"? It isn't that complicated to migrate between DEs (at least on apt-based systems). In aptitude, install the KDE metapackage (kde-standard on Debian) and then mark the "gnome" category as auto-installed (Shift-M on the category itself, rather than individual packages). Restart X.
It looks very promising. Simple, neat, clean-looking. There was discussion on /. a few days ago.
http://razor-qt.org/screenshots/
the lack of an up to date ubuntu package means I'd have manually install it on the several machines I use. I don't really like ubuntu, but that's what is used at work.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I haven't heard of such, but one idea could be to fire up a virtual machine to safely do the testing over there.
True, but that would be slower than on a real computer though. Oh well.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).