Gimme that old time interface...

[Ric Werme]

Ted Roche pondered:
>Star wrote:
>> 
>> 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

>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?

That's what I've done lately.  Before 1992 I used twm, then Alliant went into
Chapter 7 and I wound up at DEC.  Someone there used tvtwm (The Virtual Tom's
Window Manager) and I used that until HP kicked me out.  It offered a viewport
into a large virtual window which has some advantages over the workspace
stuff that Gnome has.

At home on Linux I've generally used Gnome even though I can't figure
out how to make a keystroke expand a window to full size vertically.
(Why does anyone want to expand a window like a web page or text editor
to full size horizontally.  Well, I've xterms on tvtwm streched to a screen
and a half wide, but in general....)  I have figured out how to make the
numeric keypad keys select from a 3x3 array of workspaces just like I did
with tvtwm.  (Why does anyone want to iconify a window? when you can have
three emacs and half a dozen xterms open at once with little/no overlap?)

One reason for using Gnome is the sense I should get with the 21st century.  A
significant con is the pain of trying to figure out what it does and how to
configure it.  It was so much easier to take my friend's .tvtwmrc file and
mung that to match my needs.  In fact, there's a decent chance that it would
have taken less time to find tvtwm source and get that going than it did to
bash Gnome into submission.  And I still have no good idea of exactly what
Gnome is and isn't, nor do I particularly care.

    -Ric Werme