does the desktop matter anymore? [LWN.net]

does the desktop matter anymore?

Posted Sep 27, 2005 9:09 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: does the desktop matter anymore? by b7j0c
Parent article: KDE 4 promises radical changes to the free desktop (NewsForge)

Indeed. I find that at work my KDE desktop is entirely covered with editors, shell windows, browsers and the like. The only features that see regular use are launching applications and flipping workspaces to allow launching even more applications, and to switch between them. So a much simpler system would be quite sufficient. For me, the only real advantage KDE has over fvwm and other classic WM:s is ease of configuration and adding desktop icons, buttons and other such widgets for launching apps...

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does the desktop matter anymore?

Posted Sep 29, 2005 8:56 UTC (Thu) by kdart (guest, #486) [Link]

Exactly. When I assessed what applications I actually use, I find they all use the GTK toolkit, if that. I changed to a more light-weight setup and it works great for me:

XFCE - (menus)
ROX file manager (graphical file management)
rxvt-unicode + zsh (shell interface)
Firefox (the web!)
Thunderbird for graphical email
pine for terminal email (quick interface)
gnumeric (for spreadsheet functions)
abiword (really!)
Gimp (graphics)
inkscape (vector graphics)
gvim (text editing)

All major desktop functions are covered here. I did try KDE in the past. The APIs look cool, but the actual apps are still lacking. The Kmail program twice trashed my home directory via an IMAP server!