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Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 18:32 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137)
In reply to: Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN) by horen
Parent article: Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

I tried JWM a couple months ago, but I couldn't get it to compile. The Configure script insisted that I didn't have X installed! I assume it is referring to xlibs, which I do have installed, but I didn't take time to pursue it further.

Does it support mouse-based window lowering and vertical/horizontal maximization? If it does, I may try installing it again.


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Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 19:05 UTC (Thu) by frankie (subscriber, #13593) [Link]

If you need a really innovative approach to window management, I would suggest wmii (http://www.wmii.de) instead.

Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 20:46 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

Well, I'm not really looking for anything that far from mainstream. I prefer the Windows UI with a few enhancements, such as the ability to lower windows with the mouse.

But I like their "10,000 lines of code" philosophy.

Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Posted Aug 25, 2006 7:17 UTC (Fri) by micampe (guest, #4384) [Link]

But I like their "10,000 lines of code" philosophy.

That's just dumb. How can you preemptively decide how much code a solution to a particular problem needs? In which language? Which platform?

It might be an interesting experiment, just like when people optimized every single bit on old 64k machines, or like (but certainly less so) how they do now on embedded systems: "Let's try to implement everthing we need in 10k LOC!" But that just doesn't work in general.

Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Posted Aug 25, 2006 8:47 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It might be an interesting experiment, just like when people optimized every single bit on old 64k machines, or like (but certainly less so) how they do now on embedded systems.

Old 64K machines are HUGE when you are comparing them with modern embedded systems. I've seen AES implementation squized in 256 bytes! Of course it's very expensive and just stupid to do so when you are working with full-sized system with megabutes of RAM, but it's still good idea to limit amount of code (and features) as much as possible... Today KDE and GNOME are using 10 times more resources then Windows95 used - and offer very few exhancements over it. It's just stupid. Yes, M$ also does it - but that's not the point...

Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Posted Aug 25, 2006 14:33 UTC (Fri) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

That's just dumb.
Compared to, say, this?

Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Posted Aug 25, 2006 9:28 UTC (Fri) by frankie (subscriber, #13593) [Link]

The 10k lines claim is not of my interest, but the possibility of reducing almost to null the use of mouse without annoyances, as well as having full screen use for applications, without unuseful icons/menus/applets floating around is a must for me. Surely I'm not the typical desktop users, but that kind of wm for a developer is the silver bullet.

Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 23:50 UTC (Thu) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link]

/usr/lib/libX11.what.ever.else

check if you have an LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or other environment variable) which might override what's in /etc/ld.so.conf. Also check /etc/ld.so.conf to see if /usr/lib is listed. If it isn't, add it and run "ldconfig".

Mouse-based window lowering: YES

Vertical/horizontal maximization: NO (if this is important to you, suggest it to joewing@joewing.net, and he might just incorporate it)

Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Posted Aug 25, 2006 0:40 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

More likely is that libX11 is installed (it's a rare non-headless system
that doesn't have that these days, and even most headless ones do) but the
X11 header files and .so symlink (the development packages) are not.

Which Free Linux Desktop Is Best? (CRN)

Posted Aug 26, 2006 1:58 UTC (Sat) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

Yeah, I was missing something. I thought xlib11-dev would be sufficient, but it's not. I installed the (Ubuntu) xlibs-dev transitional package, and everything is fine. Thanks.

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