Ask Slashdot: Assembling a Linux Desktop Environment From Parts? 357
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?"
Avant (Score:4, Interesting)
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
xfce4.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Arch and ArchBang (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:KDE. (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't!! (Score:4, Interesting)
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,...
good people are noticing (Score:4, Interesting)
Arch + Various (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [github.com] Enjoy!
Re:FluxBox (Score:4, Interesting)
I also found fluxbox after trying to get used to GNOME 3. Fluxbox is really nice. I added some things I cobbled together for automatic hibernation upon low power, adding nm-applet to the flux taskbar,etc. The ease of use of multiple workspaces/desktops is great. I am however typing this on a Mac my work has provided me and it is kind of re-calibrating my perspective of what a good UI can be......
Re:A panel/launcher does not a desktop make (Score:3, Interesting)
And what are these services? All you've done is say multiple times how they're different, you even included a car analogy, but you failed to name a single service. Sorry, that doesn't work for me.
*DEs are just highly bloated WMs where all the choices have been made for you, but there's no reason your WM can't be as powerful as any *DE (it often is more).
Re:KDE. (Score:5, Interesting)
> there is no reason to speak poorly of KDE.
There is if it just does dumb stuff.
I generally like the tools that come with kde... dolphin, the way its panel works, etc. However the latest versions do very annoying things. One in particular is that when copying large files (or many files) you no longer get a little window that shows the progress and gives you a "cancel" button. Instead the information is stuck in some little notification icon. This makes it difficult to monitor the progress of multiple coping/moving operations and I can't find a way to cancel the whole operation (it only cancels the current file it's working on). This one problem is enough of an annoyance that I've taken to installing gnome, then replacing the major tools with the versions from kde.
As for the memory/performance issue, the argument that kde is bloated and slow is not invalidated just because more memory and processing power is generally available. The truth is, given an amount of processing power and memory, other managers are more efficient, faster, or snappier. Some people like that. Plus, if you're not plugged in, all that extra memory usage and processing power costs battery-time, even if you're not in the 3rd world.
Re:KDE. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Haw. (Score:4, Interesting)
...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.
Re:KDE. (Score:4, Interesting)
I gave up on KDE when I discovered it is practically impossible to copy my settings from one computer to another.
Having a highly-customizable experience is great until you buy a new box and discover you're either going to waste hours reproducing your customizations manually, or try to copy things, have it break, and experience the hell of grepping for hardcoded paths in undocumented XML soup.
That's when I realized I wasn't even using much more than the window manager and the panel anyway, so I switched to FVWM2, whose configuration is stored in a single human-readable text file, and had a setup that was even more to my tastes, cloned across all my computers, in minutes.
KDE is undoubtedly awesome, but simplicity is also a feature, and it's one that the monolithic environments cannot provide -- by design.