Gimme that old time interface...

[Star]

On Nov 14, 2007 2:12 PM, Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:
> A counter question: what's the benefits and downsides of running with
> the desktop the distro defaults to? Assuming a recent machine (say, two
> gigahertz of some CPU or two, at least a gig a RAM), what's the pros and
> cons?

What made me decide to flip the switch was the fact that there were
lots of doddads that just stopped functioning properly.  Freezing
Panels, unexplained runaway memory, and a complete like of "mine" in
the UI.

It certainly has been an excersize doing this as well.  I didn't even
imagine how much I'd forgotten about building menus, laying out my
screen, dealing with removable media (iPod, thumb-drives, etc) and
generally having a clean interface.

Taking on FVWM(2) was kind of like learning French on the plane to
Paris from a 1950's genre Jr. High School text book.  A lot of
patience and perseverance and "trial-and-error" and I'm getting to a
space I'm comfortable in.  I have noticed that memory utilization is
down (according to my widget), application responsiveness is up
(according to my gut), and keeping my first line of defense being a
"weird" interface is giving me a long lost geeky glow.

This process (for me) also included a complete reload of the OS.  I'd
been running the Ubuntu track for over a year now, and it had tons of
stuff...  a lot of which I never, ever, used...  This installation was
done following the instructions for Debian from Scratch, and now I
have a pretty good (not all encompassing) idea of what's installed on
my laptop.  And what isn't...

Going this path has re-opened me to some of the lower level stuff that
I'd had no need to pay attention to.  Now I'm starting to get familiar
with HAL (yeah, that's going well) and with Volume Management
(currently going with ivman).  Experimenting with usability of
different file managers (Thunar and Rox at the moment).

The moral to the experiment is more than the desktop itself, but
that's what I see every day, hence the opening message.  Now I can
smile knowing pretty much that my machine is "tuned" to what I do and
how I do it.  Now when it breaks or doesn't respond how I want, it's
not a long flaming tirade at gnome/debian/canocial, but a new
challenge to figure out where I screwed something up.

Maybe in this case, the journey ~is~ the reason, but there's something
to learn from it.

-- 
~ *