41–50 of 130 posts
The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gno…
The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gno…
Not trying to be a problem here, but what problem does this solve? Why does someone undertake to make a new desktop environment? Is XFce/Kde/gnome/cinammon/what-have-you not enough?
I think there is a huge opportunity for a traditional, lightweight desktop that uses Qt. Both the Gnome and KDE camps have alienated large parts of their userbase during the KDE4/Gnome3 transition. I personally find both to be less usable than their predecessors. That leaves projects like Xfce/Mate to fill the gap. The problem with these environments is that they use GTK2, which is bitrotting. Migrating to GTK3 is ri…
The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gno…
The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gno…
http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/ http://windowmaker.org/
fluxbox - active and kind've interesting
awesome - more of just a WM than full DE
ratpoison - ditto
enlightenment - okay, kind've resembles Win 95 too... but more of a DE than the others you listed
windowmaker - been around forever; hasn't really "innovated" in forever; just a NeXT clone if I remember correctly for GNUStep
I think my point stands. I was talking about LXDE, Xfce, and RazorQT.
The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gno…
I'd bet the majority of the lightweight "Windows 95 clone" WMs and DEs exist because GNOME and (to a lesser extent) KDE alienated their userbases by trying to be "different" and "next generation" (mostly by poorly cloning OSX and the latest Windows version that nobody liked anyway), so I'd hesitate to say that experimentation should be left to them.
EDIT: Many commercial products suffer from this problem where the existing version is "good enough" and people are happy using it for several hours a day, but the producer needs to convince users to purchase the new version anyway, so they end up adding a lot of pointless, irritating, and even product-breaking changes just to make the new version seem revolutionary and worthy of an upgrade, even if it's actually making the product worse. Many open source devs don't seem to have realized that there is no reason for them to play this game. They don't need to sell anyone a new version in a cardboard box, so there's no conflict of interest here; they can do less work and make their users more happy by keeping things stable and incrementally improving things. Yet, very often, they ape Microsoft, Adobe, and company's spastic thrashing anyway. More ribbons!
Some years back, I worked with Qt 3.x and quite liked it. A pure Qt desktop would be interesting but I've never used LXDE. How does it compare to Openbox, which is what I use via Crunchbang? I realise Openbox is "just" a window manager so I'd like to know what additional benefits LXDE offers.
You might find some useful info regarding Crunchbang/LXDE here http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=24640
Part of the appeal for me as an artist and hacker, the Crunchbang community is incredibly creative. You can see the personality and careful attention going into the screenshots. Any pixel on the screen is fair game for customization. In my opinion, it's worth the effort to tweak your config files and get exactly the look you want. For me it's a balance between functionality, getting the most from my laptop's small screen, while creating a pleasant work environment that I don't despise.
FWIW I still use Openbox but disabled the decorations. I use pytyle2 to manage windows. Pretty much I use the Crunchbang default colors, dark but not too dark, works well at night as well as in daylight.
The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gno…
http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/ http://windowmaker.org/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is a huge opportunity for a traditional, lightweight desktop that uses Qt. Both the Gnome and KDE camps have alienated large parts of their userbase during the KDE4/Gnome3 transition. I personally find both to be less usable than their predecessors. That leaves projects like Xfce/Mate to fill the gap. The problem with these environments is that they use GTK2, which is bitrotting. Migrating to GTK3 is ri…
the modern gnome2 already exists as 'gnome3 classic mode' or mate (which will support gtk3). lxde is also nice.
The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gno…
http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/
It's not all about resources. I don't want animations for every action. For me simplicity is elegance.