XFCE 4.10: not too big, not too small, Just Right.

[reddragdiva]

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.)

Comments

Re: *clears throat*

[marahmarie]

Oh, I most definitely agree with you that Win8 wins and the future lies in tiles as opposed to Windows. And that windows (as opposed to Windows) are for the birds. Always have been, always will be. I'm not a command line geek by any stretch of the mind, but some sessions online/offline I'll run nearly everything through the command line and/or use the Run box just to have the luxury of not dealing with the taskbar and switching windows and pointing and clicking with the fucking mouse or the trackpad equivalent (the worst part of the whole Windows experience is the mouse/trackpad equivalent, by far, and unfortunately it's a trait Win shares with the Mac) and I have to say it's pretty liberating, since it's the *only* way to get out of the basically fucked-in-the-head GUI of most later versions of Windows. And I get to feel geeky for a time, for as long as I'm at it. Simple laziness keeps me from doing things that way on the tower or my laptop more often.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to Win8 features being much more widely adapted. I'm not a huge fan of touchscreen typing (physical keyboard ftw, though they have their problems, too) but I am in favor of touch functionality in general. I've been lucky enough to play with a Win7 phone or two (with the Metro tiles, same as Win8, except MS has dropped the word "Metro" in describing what is on the PC) and it is, as I said when I wrote my Android and my co-worker's Win phone up on my blog, a dream to deal with compared to Android's clunky insensitive touch screens with their apps buried in all these stupid drawers and the usual Windows experience itself. But I think it will be 2-3 years down the road before the general public widely adapts Win8 features not only in Windows, but enough to start demanding or even expecting them cross-platform (in Mac, Android, wherever) so until you get over public recalcitrance (which is almost unbelievably alive and well) we're probably going to be stuck using Win8 itself or an older Win/Android/Mac version of something or another that gets you online for quite some time.