Re: [tlug] Desktop alternatives

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Mon, 28 May 2012 07:28:00 +0900
"Chris Worthington" <kurisu@example.com> wrote:

> I'm thinking of ditching Ubuntu to go with Linux Mint for the desktop. I
> don't care for Unity and I've heard Mint is the best alternative. Anybody
> wanna chime in?

What happend to plain X11 without a desktop environment?

About half a year ago, i bought a new laptop and went trough the trouble
to see whether gnome, kde, xfce, unity would workable for me. After a
few months of trying i switched back to just icewm, with no desktop
environment. Gnome, both 2 and 3 did 80% of what i wanted to do in
an easy way (gnome3 was more like 70% but that's detail). The rest was
not only difficult, but often i couldnt figure out how to do it at all,
beside opening up a console and typing in some magic words in a long
forgotten language. Not exactly how i would want to work if i'd have
a GUI taking care of things...

XFCE was speed wise much faster than anything else. Its philosohpy matches
unix a lot better than gnome does. But IMHO it still has a long way to
go on userfriendlynes. Lots of things, that i'm used to do are hardly
possible because it's not what 90% of the users do (and i have lots
of things that i do differently than the ubuntu generation).

If you wonder why i dont mention a distro here, the reason is simple:
If you customize your desktop as i do, then the distro is of no importance
at all. It just provides a package managment and an installation system.
Everything else is the same... and thanks the FHS even the files are at
the same places nowadays.


			Attila Kinali

-- 
Why does it take years to find the answers to
the questions one should have asked long ago?