Favourite nix desktop

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag

I can do that with my mac.

Ya sure. But people _expect_ that to work on a Mac!

Remember, Linux == old and broken, Mac == shiny and get-you-laid

Is that a feature of the new intel macs, but that doesn't come standard on the power versions.

 

[Shamrock]

KDE for me. It's making the transition from Winblows much easier. Haven't put it on an HD yet, still experimenting on Live CD (SimplyMepis 6.5)

 

[R3MF]

i am a bit surpised that the ubuntu craze hasn't swamped the results in favour of Gnome, especially with a Ubuntu release yesterday!

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: drag

I can do that with my mac.

Ya sure. But people _expect_ that to work on a Mac!

Remember, Linux == old and broken, Mac == shiny and get-you-laid

Is that a feature of the new intel macs, but that doesn't come standard on the power versions.

It is, it's just undocumented. Unfortunately it involves the people that work at "genius bars" and exchanges involving large sums of money so it's not paticularely popular.

i am a bit surpised that the ubuntu craze hasn't swamped the results in favour of Gnome, especially with a Ubuntu release yesterday!

Well I think that for home desktops and given that people who do try Linux tend to be people who are of the 'power users' variety I figure it's not long until people begin to customize.

Despite warts that is the single 'killer feature' of Linux desktops; it's customization.

Even for businesses. Given they don't care so much about themes and wobbly windows, but they do care about efficient workplaces. What you can do for businesses quite easily is to take a existing Linux distribution, customize the desktop for specific roles and then deploy it.

For example a call center.
You setup LTSP on some quad Intel box with 16gigs of ram, RAID 5 scsi and a 4 gigabit port NIC card to a switch.

Some Mini-ITX machines to act as thin clients. You could easily run a entire call center with dozens and maybe a hundred or so X terminals to that single terminal server.

And it would be dead quiet, no fans, no nothing and the server is down in the network room.

Give them a simple FVWM desktop with their custom call logging program and dialer. Give them some program to take notes with. A Jabber client for messages. Have that stuff launch at start up. That's it.

Or you have data entry setup. Just give them full screen web-based application. Each get a desktop, each get a full screen Firefox browser that's been modified to get rid of all the URL bar and navigation stuff. It runs off of a web server over a VPN halfway across the world.

Or you have 'knowledge workers' with their own desktop. Setup the icons so they click this for word, click that for email, click that other thing for spreadsheet, etc. All lined up. Have a couple folders setup for network access.

Each require minimal training, minimal effort to maintain and secure. No having to have admins spending time 'locking down' desktops.

That can be very attractive for a big business.



Then the same thing for 'power' users. People use Linux workstations. They can setup the key bindings how they want. They can setup applications to launch when then want. They can change out the window manager and manage windows how they want. If you don't like how something is setup you can change it.

It's pretty easy to have a desktop with gyrations and gizmos and things blinking and scrolling.

It's also easy to just have a 'minimal' setup were you have a custom Window manager and wmctrl to almost eliminate all use of your mouse.

Whatever you want. It's tough to figure some stuff out time to time, but it's worth it if it's worth it to you.


I mean seriously.. people are doing very bizzare stuff.
Rox-desktop:
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_id=147314019460af7901d4e8&p=screen

Customized KDE:
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_...een_id=94345944845d8fc8b46821&m=screen

Customized Gnome
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_id=127884344945d8a9d297d03&p=screen

Customized KDE
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_id=74201976045d5f90262c49&p=screen

Enlightenment DR17
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_...een_id=74320653345d123fa3a670&m=screen

I think it's Metisse and Gnome
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_...en_id=194185439445d82254bfb31&m=screen

Custom Gnome
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_id=94479093246143d55e09f1&p=screen

Fluxbox
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_id=166354693845d8fcaab36fa&p=screen

Window Maker
http://windowmaker.info/imageview.php?cat=big&id=50

Afterstep
http://themes.freshmeat.net/screenshots/29122/30732/



And so people don't say 'oh it looks like windows had reproduced with apple'. You have to see them in action to appreciate them sometimes.

D17 video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0lP8QJQer0


Mandriva running Metisse
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P09WLS2a1H0&mode=related&search=

Beryl video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eOb3k_u1VI&NR=1

Fluxbox in action
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLE18zLsxtk

Ubuntu Feisty + Compiz + Windows XP.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01OqyzEyV9M&mode=related&search=


Hehe. To me all that stuff is pretty cool.

Compare all that to OS X or Vista. You can have it all big and bloated on some powerhouse of a machine with all the bling bling. But also the same systems can be made to run well on a 600mhz machine and 256 megs of RAM if you run Xubuntu.

No contest. Even when you add on all the weird shareware and pay applications that help you customize XP or OS X you only get a fraction of what you can do with Linux.

Most of all that should be aviable to you in Ubuntu. Except for Metisse, Rox-desktop, and Enlightenment DR17. But I bet you'll be able to quickly find 3rd party repos for that. If not you can compile them yourself.

And if you don't want to mess with it, don't. Default Gnome itself is pretty good and is specificly designed to be useful for a wide range of people.

 

[drag]

Oh.

And since I am in a good mood tonight I'll tell you guys something you've probably not heard of before.

Ever heard of Chromium?
Ever heard of xdmx?


Well read the wikipedia article on it first. Maybe that will help you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xdmx

Maybe, maybe not? If not then see this video:
http://filebox.vt.edu/users/plastk/video/VT24MonQuake.mp4

Now you understand. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet personally. But when I get my next laptop in a few months it's going to be one of the first things I'll setup.

On my old laptop (R.I.P.) I'd combine it with my desktop using Synergy and then X over SSH. Synergy is a way to have your mouse and keyboard input go back and forth between 2 or more machines. That way it's easy to change focus from one machine to the next. Then X over ssh is a conveniet way to run applications from one display to another. AIGLX even got me 3d acceleration over SSH.

For audio I setup PulseAudio and the alsa plugins for it so when I watched movies or played sound on my laptop it would automaticly play out on my desktop's stereo.

So that way I essentially had a dual head display, but using 2 machines instead of just two video cards. With XDMX it would be possible to combine them into one big desktop and with chromium make that desktop 3d. With that quake3 video that is 24 displays running on 12 networked Linux machines.

All sorts of weird stuff you can do.


edit:

By-the-by.

After you guys have your ubuntu stuff setup try this command:

apt-cache search dmx


Another fun command is:
apt-get moo

Who says free software folks don't innovate?

 

[smack Down]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: drag
I use XFCE a lot on older computers.

It's OK, but I miss a lot of the features that tends to make Gnome easier to use.

For example.. A big one for me is that Gnome has drag-n-drop pretty well figured out. You can mostly drag and drop anything anywere and while it may not do what you'd like always it almost does something that would be more or less usefull eventually.

Like pick any icon on this page, any button. Open up gnome-terminal and place it behind your browser. Now click on a button and drag it down to the task bar and onto the tray button representing the gnome-terminal window that is open. After a second then Gnome-terminal will pop up and you can drop the item off into it.

Of course it drops off the text for the javascript code, but whatever.

I can do that with my mac.

You can even do it on windows, but windows is smart enought to point you to the file for the icon and not give some useless javascript.

 

[aidanjm]

my preference is for KDE. I think it looks nicer than Gnome, which I perceive to be very ugly. I also find the konqueror to be indispensable, I think it is the best file manager available on any platform, it is also a brilliant web browser, network navigator, etc. I can't imagine going back to using separate programs for web browsing and file browsing.

 

[ObscureCaucasian]

I'm partial to the Gnome/Beryl combo right now. I do use Ubuntu, but I checked out Kubuntu before deciding on Gnome.

 

[Alone]

Well, back to Gnome. KDE kept assaulting my face.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Alone
Well, back to Gnome. KDE kept assaulting my face.

Yep. One day I decided to try KDE out. I didn't understand why all the themes were all red and blurry.

Then I realised that KDE made my eyes bleed.



This is why we have more then one desktop. Could you imagine trying to force all the KDE users to use Gnome?

Or trying to force developers to use a *gasp* Non-object-oriented non-C++ oriented GUI framework like Gnome?! It's blasphamy!

That being said I realy look forward to KDE4. It should realy kick-butt. Especially since they are working on a better integrated environment with data services, device integration, and such things then what is aviable in Linux right now.

 

[Alone]

The problem was that I went from a minimalistic desktop (no signs of a taskbar, no start menu, no desktop icons) to something animated in each corner. I liked all the settings, for taskbars, wallpapers, etc. They were nice. But not worth it (for now, anyways).

 

[irishScott]

Gnome for it's simplicity. If I want control, I'll use command line.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: drag
I use XFCE a lot on older computers.

It's OK, but I miss a lot of the features that tends to make Gnome easier to use.

Like pick any icon on this page, any button. Open up gnome-terminal and place it behind your browser. Now click on a button and drag it down to the task bar and onto the tray button representing the gnome-terminal window that is open. After a second then Gnome-terminal will pop up and you can drop the item off into it.

Of course it drops off the text for the javascript code, but whatever.

You can do the same thing with the tabs in your browser.

Then nautilus works pretty well. I know people hate the little windows it opens up, but since I never use a graphical file manager outside of my home directory it works for me.

Open up nautilus, show a lot of files. Look at the name of one of the files and just start typing it. Don't hit ctrl-f or / or anything like that first, just type it's name into it like you would in a terminal. When the name of the file gets highlighted then just hit enter and you'll open it.

i can do this with XFCE now, have you tried it recently? im using 4.4 on etch fwiw

 

[drag]

Ya, I played around with Xfce from Debian unstable/experimental and it seems to work like you said.

I must of been thinking of a older version.

 

[trmiv]

I prefer KDE, but since most of the help on the Ubuntu forums seems geared towards Ubuntu and not Kubuntu, I use gnome in Ubuntu.

 

[DarkThinker]

GNOMER here, it's neat, it's not bloated and yes it could use some improvements but hey, it's not like every other environment is perfect either. For me GNOME is as close as it gets

 

[drag]

I realy don't understand why Ubuntu makes such a distinction between Ubuntu vs Xubuntu vs Kubuntu and such.

Is there some differences between the KDE/Xfce versions offered on any of those distributions?

Like with Debian anybody should be able to install KDE just fine and choose what they want.

 

[Nothinman]

I realy don't understand why Ubuntu makes such a distinction between Ubuntu vs Xubuntu vs Kubuntu and such.

Support, they picked Gnome as the DE that they want to support so the others are unofficial and unsupported forks.

 

[REMF]

Originally posted by: drag
Is there some differences between the KDE/Xfce versions offered on any of those distributions?

they tend to have different versions of software, eg;

Ubuntu/Kubuntu
--------/----------
Fspot/Digikam
Gimp/Krita
Gnucash/Kmymoney
Evolution/Kontact

 

[Nothinman]

they tend to have different versions of software, eg;

You can install all of your examples on all of the different Ubuntu distributions, there's nothing stopping you from using KDE apps under Gnome or vice versa.

 

[yelo333]

KDE here, since I enjoy playing around with Python + Qt.

BTW, KDE might be getting a lot of false hits just b/c people want to see the stats, and so click "vote"...

 

[trmiv]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I realy don't understand why Ubuntu makes such a distinction between Ubuntu vs Xubuntu vs Kubuntu and such.

Support, they picked Gnome as the DE that they want to support so the others are unofficial and unsupported forks.

According to their site, Kubuntu is an official part of Ubuntu. http://www.kubuntu.com/faq.php

 

[Nothinman]

According to their site, Kubuntu is an official part of Ubuntu. http://www.kubuntu.com/faq.php

Then that's even more retarded. If Kubuntu is just a CD that defaults to KDE instead of Gnome without any other changes why does it deserve it's own disc, name, etc?

 

[Alone]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

According to their site, Kubuntu is an official part of Ubuntu. http://www.kubuntu.com/faq.php

Then that's even more retarded. If Kubuntu is just a CD that defaults to KDE instead of Gnome without any other changes why does it deserve it's own disc, name, etc?

That's because the Ubuntu CD ships with gnome installed by default. Unless they give you a choice during the install, a separate CD is required to install KDE without gnome.

 

[Nothinman]

That's because the Ubuntu CD ships with gnome installed by default. Unless they give you a choice during the install, a separate CD is required to install KDE without gnome.

I understand that, but shipping a different CD with no changes other than automatically install kbuntu-desktop instead of ubuntu-desktop is a huge waste.