Gimme that old time interface...

Tom Buskey tom at buskey.name
Wed Nov 14 10:22:30 EST 2007


On Nov 14, 2007 12:30 AM, Star <nhstar at gmail.com> wrote:

> Okay, so it sounded better with the Bob Seger riff playing in the back
> of my head...
>
> Anyway:  Lately, I realized that I was nothing short of bored with the
> two major-player options for the desktop interface.  Sure, the
> convienience of everything just working and gobs of very shiny
> information flowing into the eyeballs at the speed of cpu has served
> me well and brought me a long way into the past 5+ years of having
> various flavors of Linux be my primary work/home/life desktop.
>
> The problem is that it never felt quite like "home" to me...  A bit
> last year I had an FVWM conversation and it got me thinking, but time
> was never on my side for it...  Until this past weekend.  I finally
> got fed up with my 3 year old laptop showing it's age (it's a p4 2.6g
> with 2g of memory) and the *#$@*#$! panel freezing up on boot (there's
> only so many times you can type "killall -9 gnome-panel without
> starting to visualize blood).  So I cracked open the man-pages,


My fastest laptop at home is a P4m 2.4 with 1GB ram :-)
At work I have a Dell GX280 w/ a P4 2.6(?) and 2GB ram.


>
> My question here is this:  What are users here using if they shy away
> from all of the main-stream (can that be said with Linux yet?)
> desktops and go for that "One Off" style
>

At work I'm using Fedora 7 and gnome.
At home on the laptop Xubuntu with XFCE.

On my servers I usually turn off the Xserver because I'm usually SSHing in.
I only need the X console because something went wrong with SSH.  If I could
serial into the bios like with a Sun, I'd disconnect the keyboard & screen.


> I know the benies to using KDE and Gnome, i'm wondering about the
> multitude of users with Black/Whitebox with PERLed out menues and the
> likes...


Hmm, I've done olwm, olvwm, mwm, twm, ctwm, fvwm, SGI (4dwm?), cde (for a
week), enlightenment, gnome, kde, xfce, MacOSX and Windows XP.

I liked ctwm because I was coming from twm and could just tweak my .twmrc
which someone once really customized to work like mwm.  I switched to fvwm
because I was tired of recompiling ctwm for new versions of Solaris and
someone else was running fvwm.

fvwm is really nice.  I've run a dual monitor setup w/ gnome on one screen
and fvwm on the other.

xfce on my laptop is faster then gnome I think.  It works well for me also.

I really don't care much nowadays as long as I have decent workspaces, can
point to focus, raise/lower with a middle mouse and have some speed.  99% of
the time I launch from the command line so I don't care about the menus for
something I use all the time.  If I'm looking for something new, I like the
menus.  I hate when they say "Web browser" when it's really firefox.  Or
konqueror or safari, etc.

ctwm, fvwm and xfce meet all my requirements.  Gnome is on the linux and
solaris 10 systems I use and is fast enough.  I find I dislike OSX and
Windows because they don't have decent workspaces that work well with
multiple x terminal windows.
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