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?"

FluxBox

[Katyrnyn]

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.

Awesome WM

[semi-extrinsic]

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 [naquadah.org]

Re:Compiz, tint2, kupfer, conky, pcmanfm

[Narksos]

(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.

CLI Linux

[gajop]

TL:DR https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=131196 [archlinux.org] 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.

Re:KDE.

[ifiwereasculptor]

Not really. It only has crap default settings. Deactivate Nepomuk, for instance, and you'll see memory usage plummet. I'm using KDE 4.6 and it uses only ~380Mb at startup. Even running Firefox and GIMP I rarely use 1Gb of RAM. KDE is very good when properly tuned, insufferable if not.

A panel/launcher does not a desktop make

[Dcnjoe60]

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.

I'm not alone.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Awesome WM

[nem75]

This.

I actually liked Unity very much, but in it's latest installment it became a sluggish PITA, so I started looking for alternatives. After using lxde-dekstop on the existing Ubuntu for a bit. Then I scratched that and started to build a complete custom install on the basis of the ubuntu minimal install CD.

So now I use lightdm, awesome wm with xcompmgr for basic drop shadows, Ambiance themes, Faenza icons and everything Ubuntu has to offer in the way of clear, smooth font display. Only gnome-settings-manager and gnome-keyring are left from Gnome Desktop.

This is the snappiest, fastest and most usable desktop environment I've worked with so far. I use it on my work notebook, with two 90 degree tilted external displays, and everything works without a hitch, even switching from rotated displays to the notebook screen and back (thanks to xrandr -o and disper).

It's geeky and a bit of a learning curve if you want to customize, but I'd definitely recommend giving it a try.

(And - on a DE unrelated note - if you work with code everyday tilting your display and seeing the code over the full _length_ of your monitor is like a breath of fresh air. ;))

Re:Openbox

[CAIMLAS]

You guys both have a point, but you're also being assholes.

I've known people who have "20 years in the business", with resumes and 'experience' to match who are insufferable, incompetent idiots. I know people who have only been working on computers for 10 months (in any practical fashion aside from basic end user stuff) and are more capable and intelligent than said 20-year veterans.

There was no reason to jump on him for his claims. 10 years of 60-hour-week computing isn't necessarily impressive, but it does mean he uses a computer quite a bit. There's been a lot of time for concepts and principles to leech into his brain, regardless of his efforts. Everybody's different.

Re:KDE.

[shish]

I have 64-bit enlightenment; ignoring the four major memory hogs that I've chosen to add (chrome, spotify, liferea, skype), my whole system is 300MB after several days of heavy use, looking at the desktop environment alone, it's about 40MB. Now that I think about it, I wonder what it's using all that memory for...

I think the thing that most impresses me about E is that while it was seen as incredibly bloated when first introduced, it's the only bit of software I can think of where the system requirements have stayed constant while new features were added, and it's now classed as a lightweight; seeing the other DEs getting slower with every generation despite running on faster hardware, I wonder how they do it...