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reddragdivaThe 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.)
*clears throat*
Date: 2012-10-01 04:10 am (UTC)Re: *clears throat*
Date: 2012-10-01 07:18 am (UTC)Day two of Windows 7. It's a good host for Firefox. Everything else I do with it, its limitations frustrate me. But YMMV, as I noted.
Re: *clears throat*
Date: 2012-10-01 08:16 am (UTC)With the personal note that I really did not like KDE3. KDE 1 was good; everything since was bloaty. And *ALL* KDE themes are fugly to my eyes /except/ Red Hat Bluecurve. (And I don't want to use Red Hat (but note to self: I need to try Centos).)
Xandros make KDE pleasant and usable; nobody else.
I actually like it that desktop is now a demarkation between the big distros. AISI the split is:
* Ubuntu = Unity
* Fedora = GNOME 3
* SUSE = KDE 4
* Everyone else = something else (maybe one of the above (but who cares?))
Re: *clears throat*
Date: 2012-10-01 08:42 am (UTC)If you want something Windows-like - and I really do not; if I wanted Windows, which I don't, I'd bloody run Windows - then Mint 13 LTS is currently the best offering. There is a battle on right now between two rival taskbar-and-start-menu-style desktops: Cinnamon (GNOME-3-based) and Maté (GNOME 2 fork). Time will tell who wins.
But not being remotely Windows-like has not hurt Mac OS X. I think that trying to pretend to be something it's not is the wrong path for Linux. I'm not saying I know what the right path is, and I'm definitely not saying Unity is it.
Linux distros spent nearly a decade trying to look a bit like Windows and it got them nowhere. Ubuntu made headway just by trying to be polished and simple and whole. It worked. I think some of the stuff they're trying now - HUD, lenses, reduction of menus, etc. - is less than ideal, but in general I support the idea of simplification.
I know the billion-odd Windows users like the whole taskbar-and-start-menu thing, but love 'em or hate 'em, the whole fondleslab phone/tablet revolution has shown that it's the old thing. The masses have voted and are voting with their feet. WIMPs are on the way out. Yes, a billion people use them, but the other six-sevenths of the human race have never seen one and never will. I hope they never have to learn what a mouse is or how one works & if keyboards become a mysterious antique that's fine with me - I have my treasured IBM Model Ms.
I strongly support the continuation of Windows-like desktops for those who want them, but I think it's a legacy technology that is going to fade from prominence & I am more than fine with that. I was a seasoned professional when the taskbar first appeared; it really is not all that. There are better ways, or at least, one just as good.
You wanna know the next big thing?
Well, tough, Ima tell you anyway.
TNBT is going to be the tiling window manager.
Win8 shows the way in a very limited form. Resizable overlapping windows are going to become a legacy tech. Smart tiling WMs that let you see 2 (or 3 or 4 or 5 or so, but not many more) apps at once will come in from the world of weird edgy experimental Unix windowmanagers (stuff like ratpoison, xmonad, dwm, wmii) and merge into the "desktop" OSs.
Because they will let the nerds have their precious multiple-apps-at-once on slate-type computers, without freaking out the non-nerds too much. I've been in support since the days of MS-DOS; ordinary Joes do not know how to manage windows *and they shouldn't have to*.
Apple hasn't realised this yet - with iOS, you get one app at a time and that's it. Win8 breaks that open - you can have 2, split about 70:30. Wooo. But this is actually the beginning of something big. What it needs is smarts - so it can work out what is effective in small windows and what needs big ones, so you can have 1 or 2 main windows taking most of the space, and a handful of small ones. The power users will supplement this with virtual desktops.
All the nerds will scream at first. I remember it last time, when they all hated GUIs and wanted the command line. Within a few years, they were all happy. They loved their GUIs even though they wouldn't admit it and even a quarter of a century later, it remains a badge of nerd pride to be competent at the command line.
Well, it's going to happen again. You read it here first. Overlapping, manually-managed windows are going to go away, intelligently auto-tiled ones will replace them, meaning that nerds have no wasted pixels and non-nerds need never even know what a window is.
Within a few years, everyone will love their efficiently-tiled screens with not a pixel of wallpaper to be seen, but it will become a new badge of nerd pride to have a keystroke to flip to overlapping windows and to know how to use them. But most won't, not unless they're being watched.
Betcha.
Re: *clears throat*
Date: 2012-10-02 02:49 am (UTC)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.