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reddragdiva) wrote2012-09-30 04:43 pm
XFCE 4.10: not too big, not too small, Just Right.
The work laptop is now on Xubuntu 12.10 beta, which includes XFCE 4.10. This works just like 4.8 but with a few annoyances fixed (e.g., there's a menu editor, it comes with the GVFS backends; though I still have to faff to make caps lock a control key). And that's how it should be.
The question with minimal desktops is the fine line between as simple as possible and just a bit too simple. How much basic stuff do you have to add back? 4.8 took it slightly far, 4.10 is almost Just Right. XFCE is so far a case study in Not Fucking It Up; I hope they never go to version 5, and just update 4 forever.
What I heartily recommend about Xubuntu: My machine is instantly way more responsive than under GNOME or KDE. This is the fucking future, our computers have four cores of streamlined and optimised CPU power with not a lot to do, they should fucking run like it.
Of course, you can go too far. Os Keyes just tried Lubuntu:
"I have been using it for 5 seconds. The interaction design was clearly done by a fucking postdoc in heuristic estimation or getting CoffeeScript to work underwater or some similarly highly-interesting-shit-that-is-ultimately-irrelevant-to-MAKING-SOMETHING-USEFUL. The icons are about as intuitive as one of those zelda box-moving games, the taskbar is so slim as to be virtually invisible, and no amount of whizzy speed makes up for the fact that they clearly took all ubuntu elements that demonstrate Canonical's Windows poseur status and KILLED ANYTHING THAT WASN'T DESIGNED WITH THAT IN MIND. TL;DR if you offered me a choice between using this and having my balls deep-fried and served to the queen as an entree my only objection would be to using low-grade oil in the fryer."
I have in fact run an all-macho desktop of just Sawfish and xterms, middle-click to start anything. After a while I got sick of doing everything by hand and just installed KDE 3, which didn't suck and was just lovely (if still a bit fat), and I don't know what fucked-up rush of blood to the head was responsible for KDE 4 but it was an unmitigated disaster and conclusive evidence that computer scientists need to be kept on a short fucking leash around shit people actually use, particularly if they EVER use the words "semantic" or "ontological" in ANY circumstances. Different-but-the-same shit happened to GNOME 3, only worse.
When people combine the words "desktop" and "innovation", I reach for my revolver.
(For gratuitous horror: I'm actually posting this from Windows 7. Well, I did say to IT that I'd beta-test it. Firefox is noticeably faster on the same hardware; wonder if it's still faster in Wine.)
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Really?! Even Debian has only gone as far as presuming i686 ...
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https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrecisePangolin/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuDesktop#System_Requirements
It's sort of reasonable if you're aiming at modern-ish kit; without PAE the 32-bit version can't access >~3.5GB RAM. The snag is that quite a lot of not-that-old and budget Celerons and things don't have PAE.
Lubuntu & Xubuntu still support non-PAE chips.
Allegedly even that is going away in 12.10, though. I do think that is rather foolish. Perhaps the metadistros will solve it; if not, it will lend impetus to the non-'Buntus & that sort of pleases me as well as saddening me.
I am increasingly favouring the POV that seems to be gaining mindshare: that there needs to be focus on One Linux Distro for headway to be made.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html
As it is, ISTM, there are 2 distros plus outliers: Ubuntu, Fedora and the rest. Mint is making headway but comes with prices of its own. Everyone else is marginal now, ISTM.
I would rather, I think, that there were one "market" leader + a broader diversity of outliers. I can't see how to get there from here, though.
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Whereas I appreciate that there *are* good reasons for it, I think it's the wrong choice. I think the smarter one would have been to say:
Do you have a 64-bit PC? If so, run the 64-bit version. Otherwise, here's a 32-bit version. It doesn't support more than 3-and-a-bit gig of RAM without a big of jiggery-pokery (i.e. switching to the PAE kernel), but it works on your older kit.
64-bit Just Works these days. I've had no compatibility problems in a year or so and they were trivial back then. The single worst I've seen was that Mozilla only offered a 32-bit build of Seamonkey, so Flash didn't work. Big deal.
As for Debian, on my non-PAE Thinkpad, I now have to run a 486 kernel. It works fine but
I'm not very happy about that.