I've used Gnome ever since Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) more than 10 years ago. Switched to Ubuntu about 6 years ago. Gnome 2 worked fine.
Then came that mess Unity. And the Gnome 3 monstrosity.
I've tried KDE in and out. KDE 1. KDE 2. KDE 3. KDE 4. Always bloated, slow, buggy. Even the late, considered good KDE 4.6 and 4.7 releases. It would crash even with just a Konqueror file browser window. It sucked.
After Unity and Gnome 3, I've used KDE 4.6 and 4.7 exclusively last year, both in Ubuntu (always the latest version) at home and Fedora 15 and 16 at work. I swear I've tried. But I couldn't stand the bloat and the bugs.
So I've switched to XFCE, and never looked back. Simple, fast, customizable enough, just like Gnome 2 was.
I've been using Ubuntu/Xubuntu for the last 6 years, and I like playing games in emulators like MAME and Mednafen. Pulseaudio causes delays, sometimes of several seconds, with the libsdl pulseaudio package installed.
I have a simple 14 dollars Sound Blaster Audigy SE PCI card.
Purging Pulseaudio and using plain ALSA makes all of my sound problems go away.
The sound lag in some emulators is gone. I can even watch movie files with 5.1 surround sound without any problem, and several sound outputting applications such as the flash plugin under Firefox work simultaneously.
What about the thousands (or even more) apps already written in VBScript+Access in business places all around the world? You can't seriously be thinking your average office worker drone would have more exposure to Python+SQLite reading material ("for dummies" books) than there are for MS Office apps (I fully agree that Microsoft is the devil, monopolists bastards etc).
Some people here on/. seem to have very little connection to the real world... and I'm not that new here.
I've been there and have stopped using Microsoft's Explorer as a file manager years ago.
After trying some file managers (can't remember them all, just Singularity) I settled on Nikos Bozinis' 2xExplorer. http://netez.com/2xExplorer/ It's one of the very best free Windows file managers there is (and I have tried a lot of them). It's not open source, but neither is Windows itslef.
Some years later Nikos went commercial: http://www.zabkat.com/ I've used the trial but I like 2xExplorer. It's good for fast keyboard navigation. I don't even use the tree view, just the two panes. There are hotkeys to jump to bookmarked directories (control+1,2,3...), or directly to drives (control+alt+drive letter).
Nowadays I use it at work (Windows XP), and I'm a lot happier with Ubuntu Linux and the plain Gnome file manager Nautilus at home.
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I've used Gnome ever since Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) more than 10 years ago. Switched to Ubuntu about 6 years ago. Gnome 2 worked fine.
Then came that mess Unity. And the Gnome 3 monstrosity.
I've tried KDE in and out. KDE 1. KDE 2. KDE 3. KDE 4. Always bloated, slow, buggy. Even the late, considered good KDE 4.6 and 4.7 releases. It would crash even with just a Konqueror file browser window. It sucked.
After Unity and Gnome 3, I've used KDE 4.6 and 4.7 exclusively last year, both in Ubuntu (always the latest version) at home and Fedora 15 and 16 at work. I swear I've tried. But I couldn't stand the bloat and the bugs.
So I've switched to XFCE, and never looked back. Simple, fast, customizable enough, just like Gnome 2 was.
I've been using Ubuntu/Xubuntu for the last 6 years, and I like playing games in emulators like MAME and Mednafen. Pulseaudio causes delays, sometimes of several seconds, with the libsdl pulseaudio package installed.
I have a simple 14 dollars Sound Blaster Audigy SE PCI card.
Purging Pulseaudio and using plain ALSA makes all of my sound problems go away.
The sound lag in some emulators is gone. I can even watch movie files with 5.1 surround sound without any problem, and several sound outputting applications such as the flash plugin under Firefox work simultaneously.
What about the thousands (or even more) apps already written in VBScript+Access in business places all around the world? You can't seriously be thinking your average office worker drone would have more exposure to Python+SQLite reading material ("for dummies" books) than there are for MS Office apps (I fully agree that Microsoft is the devil, monopolists bastards etc). Some people here on /. seem to have very little connection to the real world... and I'm not that new here.
I've been there and have stopped using Microsoft's Explorer as a file manager years ago.
After trying some file managers (can't remember them all, just Singularity) I settled on Nikos Bozinis' 2xExplorer. http://netez.com/2xExplorer/ It's one of the very best free Windows file managers there is (and I have tried a lot of them). It's not open source, but neither is Windows itslef.
Some years later Nikos went commercial: http://www.zabkat.com/ I've used the trial but I like 2xExplorer. It's good for fast keyboard navigation. I don't even use the tree view, just the two panes. There are hotkeys to jump to bookmarked directories (control+1,2,3...), or directly to drives (control+alt+drive letter).
Nowadays I use it at work (Windows XP), and I'm a lot happier with Ubuntu Linux and the plain Gnome file manager Nautilus at home.