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Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops?

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RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> writes:

> Michael Casadevall <mcasadevall@soylentnews.org> writes:
>
>> I've been recently fighting a major uphill battle with adding a second
>> monitor to my desktop, and in what is quite possibly a fit of insanity,
>> went and compiled CDE from source. The end result is surprisingly usable
>> though Motif has some hiccups with dealing with X apps that are a bit
>> too smart (pinentry-x11) for their own good.
>>
>> I'd like to say that this is a *NIX only problem, but Windows 8 and 10
>> also pail in comparison for usability and "getting stuff done" that 7
>> had. I've used most of the major desktop operating systems, every
>> version of Windows, OS/2, classic Mac OS, OS X from 10.1 to 10.5, and
>> even worked professionally on both Debian and Ubuntu and I never
>> remember fighting my systems as much to do simple basic things. So I'm
>> curious if comp.misc in general agrees with me, or thinks I'm out of my
>> mind. If you do agree with me, I'd also like to know why, and what
>> you've done about it.
>> Michael
>
> Nope, I'm with you on this one (+1 for the soylent addy, BTW).  The only
> two things I really want in a desktop are a keystroke combination to
> launch commands (preferably a slightly smart one), an easy way to switch
> between ongoing tasks, an easy way to monitor my system stats, and
> ... well, actually that's about it.  I do like a menu system for
> discovering software on my system I don't use often, but even that's an
> option.  That means I've been 100% satisfied with the following:
>
> •        KDE3
> •        Gnome2
> •        Cinnamon
> •        Windowmaker
> •        {flux|open|black} box with grun
> •        Enlightenment now Moksha
> •        KDE4
> •        FVWM2
> •        VTWM with grun
> •        LXDE
>
> Each has a pitfall or two.  KDE4 crashes a lot, in my experience.
> Cinnamon is gorgeous but I miss a few windowing commands (like that
> effect where a window rolls up like a windowshade).  KDE3 looks a bit
> dated these days but I find it perfectly functional.
>
> My sweet spot has always been Windowmaker (and I see they've got a new
> version just released this week!).  It's been just about perfect for
> me.  Enlightenment is beautiful, but I typically use it on Bodhi, which
> gives me hassles in other areas since it's such a spartan distro.  LXDE
> is fine for me; VTWM was a bit wonky.  FVWM2 does everything I need it
> to (ie, launch a bunch of terminal emulators, emacs, and a browser).
>
> Mac OSX was perfect around Snow Leopard and has gotten more annoying
> since.  Windows was perfect around Win7 and has gotten more annoying
> since.  Gnome3 I find impossible to use.
>
> On my desktop (mouse, keyboard) I usually revert to Windowmaker.  On my
> netbook, Linux Mint with Cinnamon has been effortless.  I run BSD
> headless on my servers.  Happy camper!
>
> Got to say though, knowing I can run KDE3, FVWM2, LXDE, or any *box
> window manager, the idea that modern Macs or Windows boxes require 4G
> for a desktop is appalling.  So much waste!  17 years ago I used Linux
> no differently than I use it today and 128MB of RAM were just fine.
> (OK, I'm happy to concede a little more RAM in exchange for Unicode,
> better font rendering, and maybe a couple of other things, but that's
> about it!)  Seems these other systems use up all that RAM doing things I
> find annoying anyway!
>
> Obviously, you should all get off my lawn.

I keep coming back to stumpwm for both desktop and laptop use.

It's a tiling window manager, so I don't spend quite as much time
shuffling windows around, but unlike a lot of other tiling WMs, it
allows you to split the screen into static frames for your windows
rather than automatically resizing things. I also find the keybindings
to be the least intrusive: every command is prefixed with Ctrl-T, so my
WM isn't eating a bunch of Ctrl- Alt- key combos that other applications
want to use (using emacs within some WMs can be an exercise in
frustration). If I need to pass Ctrl-T to an application, I simply
type "Ctrl-T T".

It's written in Common Lisp so theoretically you can modify it on the
fly, but now that I've got my configuration file the way I like it, that
hasn't been a big deal. However, the ability to eval lisp code on the
fly *was* a big bonus when I was working on my .stumpwmrc, because I
could sit there and poke configuration changes into the running WM and
copy them into my config file if it worked right.


pham

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Thread

Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Michael Casadevall <mcasadevall@soylentnews.org> - 2017-03-12 20:38 -0400
  Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Adrian Caspersz <email@here.invalid> - 2017-03-13 12:58 +0000
  Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2017-03-13 21:03 -0400
    Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Michael Casadevall <mcasadevall@soylentnews.org> - 2017-03-13 22:31 -0400
      Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2017-03-14 23:17 -0400
        Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Kerry Imming <kcimming@pobox.com> - 2017-03-15 07:00 -0500
          Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Dan Espen <despen@verizon.net> - 2017-03-15 11:37 -0400
            Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Kerry Imming <kcimming@pobox.com> - 2017-03-16 08:29 -0500
              Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-03-16 16:22 +0200
            Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Andreas Eder <a_eder_muc@web.de> - 2017-03-18 20:02 +0100
              Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2017-03-19 19:06 -0400
                Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Michael Casadevall <mcasadevall@soylentnews.org> - 2017-03-24 12:58 -0400
    Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Pham Nuwen <phamnuwen@example.com> - 2017-03-14 09:50 -0700
  Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? ANTant@zimage.com (Ant) - 2017-03-14 03:03 -0500
  Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? songbird <songbird@anthive.com> - 2017-03-14 11:47 -0400
  Re: Am I the only one sick of "modern" desktops? Anssi Saari <as@sci.fi> - 2017-03-14 12:42 +0200

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