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Choice of window manager in Slackware 14.1
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Henrik Carlqvist
Feb 16, 2014, 5:39:48 AM2/16/14
to
I really appreciate the discussion in the thread "Choice of file system",
that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after having used
reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the same question
about window managers:
To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
window manager(s) do you prefer?
Are you still an old school fvwm user?
Are you really old school using twm?
Do you stick to the default KDE?
Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
I have been using KDE since Gnome was removed from Slackware and it has
worked OK up to version 13.1. There have been some quirks about nepomuk
sometimes filling up the users home partitions, but for most users KDE
has worked fine once I system globally disabled nepomuk.
When evaluating KDE in Slackware 14.1 however, I have in only 5 working
days found at least two different ways for KDE to lock up into an
unusable state. (See my threads "plasma-desktop and NFS problem in
Slackware 14.1" and "mouse cursor blocked in Slackware 14.1 KDE"). I fear
that if I provide such a system to a lot of users it is going to bite
back on me.
It could also be worth noting that I am relly not only looking for a
simple window manager. As most users does not have root access the KDE
functionality of detecting and supporting hot-plugged USB disks is really
appreciated.
regards Henrik
--
The address in the header is only to prevent spam. My real address is:
hc351(at)poolhem.se Examples of addresses which go to spammers:
root@localhost postmaster@localhost
that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after having used
reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the same question
about window managers:
To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
window manager(s) do you prefer?
Are you still an old school fvwm user?
Are you really old school using twm?
Do you stick to the default KDE?
Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
I have been using KDE since Gnome was removed from Slackware and it has
worked OK up to version 13.1. There have been some quirks about nepomuk
sometimes filling up the users home partitions, but for most users KDE
has worked fine once I system globally disabled nepomuk.
When evaluating KDE in Slackware 14.1 however, I have in only 5 working
days found at least two different ways for KDE to lock up into an
unusable state. (See my threads "plasma-desktop and NFS problem in
Slackware 14.1" and "mouse cursor blocked in Slackware 14.1 KDE"). I fear
that if I provide such a system to a lot of users it is going to bite
back on me.
It could also be worth noting that I am relly not only looking for a
simple window manager. As most users does not have root access the KDE
functionality of detecting and supporting hot-plugged USB disks is really
appreciated.
regards Henrik
--
The address in the header is only to prevent spam. My real address is:
hc351(at)poolhem.se Examples of addresses which go to spammers:
root@localhost postmaster@localhost
greymausg
Feb 16, 2014, 7:55:18 AM2/16/14
to
--
maus
.
.
...
Loki Harfagr
Feb 16, 2014, 8:35:30 AM2/16/14
to
Sun, 16 Feb 2014 12:55:18 +0000, greymausg did cat :
+1 for Xfce, on my own installations I use fluxbox and have
some fun on another one with cairo-dock but for actual users I
set them up with Xfce since its defaults are almost all the best
and its user level configuration is versatile and easy going.
some fun on another one with cairo-dock but for actual users I
set them up with Xfce since its defaults are almost all the best
and its user level configuration is versatile and easy going.
Rinaldi J. Montessi
Feb 16, 2014, 9:36:10 AM2/16/14
to
Henrik Carlqvist decreed, Read These Runes!:
> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
Set it up one time and used it for a few months just for the mental
exercise.
> Are you really old school using twm?
>
> Do you stick to the default KDE?
>
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
It's not my preference, I liked KDE 3.5, but it's my best option.
Having to use devilspie to manage window placement is annoying but it
gets the job done. Biggest criticism of XFCE4 is it is real sloppy with
dual monitors. Maybe someday I'll find a way to tell it to ignore
monitor 2 unless I say otherwise ;-) Especially when setting workspace
margins.
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
I started out with IceWm in the late 90's.
> I have been using KDE since Gnome was removed from Slackware and it has
> worked OK up to version 13.1. There have been some quirks about nepomuk
> sometimes filling up the users home partitions, but for most users KDE
> has worked fine once I system globally disabled nepomuk.
>
> When evaluating KDE in Slackware 14.1 however, I have in only 5 working
> days found at least two different ways for KDE to lock up into an
> unusable state. (See my threads "plasma-desktop and NFS problem in
> Slackware 14.1" and "mouse cursor blocked in Slackware 14.1 KDE"). I fear
> that if I provide such a system to a lot of users it is going to bite
> back on me.
I would lay favorable odds that it does. I consider myself somewhat of
an advanced user and found myself frustrated with KDE4's antics. I
really like some of its features but the headaches keep me away. Plasma
be damned.
> It could also be worth noting that I am relly not only looking for a
> simple window manager. As most users does not have root access the KDE
> functionality of detecting and supporting hot-plugged USB disks is really
> appreciated.
I use the XFCE4 Mount Plugin for USB and DVD devices. Follows mount
definitions in fstab. Requires two mouse clicks: first to bring up the
device list, second to mount/unmount.
--
Information Center, n.:
A room staffed by professional computer people whose job it is
to tell you why you cannot have the information you require.
> I really appreciate the discussion in the thread "Choice of file system",
> that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after having used
> reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the same question
> about window managers:
>
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
Currently using XFCE4. I used KDE version 3.5 but absolutely detest 4.xx.
> that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after having used
> reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the same question
> about window managers:
>
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
exercise.
> Are you really old school using twm?
>
> Do you stick to the default KDE?
>
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
Having to use devilspie to manage window placement is annoying but it
gets the job done. Biggest criticism of XFCE4 is it is real sloppy with
dual monitors. Maybe someday I'll find a way to tell it to ignore
monitor 2 unless I say otherwise ;-) Especially when setting workspace
margins.
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
> I have been using KDE since Gnome was removed from Slackware and it has
> worked OK up to version 13.1. There have been some quirks about nepomuk
> sometimes filling up the users home partitions, but for most users KDE
> has worked fine once I system globally disabled nepomuk.
>
> When evaluating KDE in Slackware 14.1 however, I have in only 5 working
> days found at least two different ways for KDE to lock up into an
> unusable state. (See my threads "plasma-desktop and NFS problem in
> Slackware 14.1" and "mouse cursor blocked in Slackware 14.1 KDE"). I fear
> that if I provide such a system to a lot of users it is going to bite
> back on me.
an advanced user and found myself frustrated with KDE4's antics. I
really like some of its features but the headaches keep me away. Plasma
be damned.
> It could also be worth noting that I am relly not only looking for a
> simple window manager. As most users does not have root access the KDE
> functionality of detecting and supporting hot-plugged USB disks is really
> appreciated.
definitions in fstab. Requires two mouse clicks: first to bring up the
device list, second to mount/unmount.
--
Information Center, n.:
A room staffed by professional computer people whose job it is
to tell you why you cannot have the information you require.
Ars Ivci
Feb 16, 2014, 10:28:26 AM2/16/14
to
Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> writes:
> I really appreciate the discussion in the thread "Choice of file system",
> that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after having used
> reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the same question
> about window managers:
>
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
>
> Are you really old school using twm?
>
> Do you stick to the default KDE?
>
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
>
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
>
It has always been XFCE for me. Although, I do not remove KDE, I always
> I really appreciate the discussion in the thread "Choice of file system",
> that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after having used
> reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the same question
> about window managers:
>
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
>
> Are you really old school using twm?
>
> Do you stick to the default KDE?
>
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
>
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
>
add gtk apps to supplement XFCE: Chromium (I do not like FF), Evince,
Transmission, Engrampa and Libre Office to be specific.
peace,
Henrik Carlqvist
Feb 16, 2014, 10:49:09 AM2/16/14
to
Thanks for all the replies! So far everyone seems to agree that XFCE is
the way to go and I will switch from KDE to XFCE next week to test it out.
Maybe, in Slack14.1 XFCE even is the default, it might only have been me
who reused my old custom /var/log/setup/setup.xwmconfig to link
xinitrc.kde to xinitrc without any qeustions asked. If I like XFCE i will
alter my setup.xwmconfig to link to xfce instead without any questions.
I have customized the installation process to minimize the number of
question asked during installation and not asking any questions at all
during the configuration phase after packages have been installed.
the way to go and I will switch from KDE to XFCE next week to test it out.
Maybe, in Slack14.1 XFCE even is the default, it might only have been me
who reused my old custom /var/log/setup/setup.xwmconfig to link
xinitrc.kde to xinitrc without any qeustions asked. If I like XFCE i will
alter my setup.xwmconfig to link to xfce instead without any questions.
I have customized the installation process to minimize the number of
question asked during installation and not asking any questions at all
during the configuration phase after packages have been installed.
Clark Smith
Feb 16, 2014, 10:52:54 AM2/16/14
to
On Sun, 16 Feb 2014 10:39:48 +0000, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
> I really appreciate the discussion in the thread "Choice of file
> system", that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after
> having used reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the
> same question about window managers:
>
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
>
> Are you really old school using twm?
>
> Do you stick to the default KDE?
>
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
>
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
XFCE and LXDE in some boxes. I wouldn't shed a tear were KDE to
> I really appreciate the discussion in the thread "Choice of file
> system", that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after
> having used reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the
> same question about window managers:
>
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
>
> Are you really old school using twm?
>
> Do you stick to the default KDE?
>
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
>
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
be excised from Slackware.
Message has been deleted
notbob
Feb 16, 2014, 11:54:31 AM2/16/14
to
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
For the last several Slack revs, I've settled into a full install,
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
using fluxbox as my WM/DE. Since I'm an old geezer w/ bad eyesight, I
always use full windows for everything and alt-tab to row through
them. This means I don't give a rat's ass about themes or wallpaper
or transparency or any of that nonsense. FB works quite well, as
ohsonasty and neopuke daemons don't even boot in FB, yet I still have
access to all of the good things KDE includes, like K3B, konsole,
gwenview, okular, etc. A note, before changing to default FB, go into
full KDE at least once to set all yer peripheral settings like mouse,
keyboard, cursor speed/accel, monitor res, sound settings, etc. Set
'em, then forget 'em. FB has a very good wiki page on how to config
and use it. FBs menu system is completely customizable, but its
default is mostly KDE utils. Very handy.
http://www.fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php?title=Fluxbox-wiki
nb
Ewald Pfau
Feb 16, 2014, 12:07:05 PM2/16/14
to
Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com>:
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
I prefer that the default screen is perfectly empty. Cannot have this with
xfce, so I just continued ever since happily with GNUstep / Windowmaker.
Though it is nice to have Thunar and Terminal from xfce ... after having
disabled additional access to storage devices in Thunar, which the actual
user doesn't have (had to replace some demon by a link to /dev/null or
similar). Tried to use Orage just as a calendar, but realized, once it is
switched on, it cannot be switched off again. So I don't use it.
Ok, so not to start talking about KDE, as rantings would become endless.
At some other time, use of Thunar has cost me some lot of pictures on a
stick, when Thunar disagreed with me and wiped away all contents on a stick,
when it should not have had writing access rights to do that.
So I gave it a closer look and decided, this is not about me to be tamed by
a machine, but instead me to tame the machine, in order that it will not do
that again. Sadly enough, too many people seem to accept being treated
other way around and call this modern then.
For my kind of view, GNUstep is really a nice tool, beyond just rudimentary
access. At least it keeps away from that crazy guesswork, trying to deal
with who I am.
If ever today turns out to really be a different day than yesterday ...
what are all those many watchdogs and history record graves good for,
anyway?
But, ok, the other day I gave it a try to convince the mozilla machine, that
it needs not store just _any_ detail except bookmarks to survive one
session.
No way.
If one wants the machine to stay just an isolated entity by itself, so one
has to freeze some state of the complete configuration, and replace the
current configuration with this one, over and over again. One cannot delete
the traces any more. So thank you very much for such a perfect inspection
tool into my privacy I never asked for.
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
xfce, so I just continued ever since happily with GNUstep / Windowmaker.
Though it is nice to have Thunar and Terminal from xfce ... after having
disabled additional access to storage devices in Thunar, which the actual
user doesn't have (had to replace some demon by a link to /dev/null or
similar). Tried to use Orage just as a calendar, but realized, once it is
switched on, it cannot be switched off again. So I don't use it.
Ok, so not to start talking about KDE, as rantings would become endless.
At some other time, use of Thunar has cost me some lot of pictures on a
stick, when Thunar disagreed with me and wiped away all contents on a stick,
when it should not have had writing access rights to do that.
So I gave it a closer look and decided, this is not about me to be tamed by
a machine, but instead me to tame the machine, in order that it will not do
that again. Sadly enough, too many people seem to accept being treated
other way around and call this modern then.
For my kind of view, GNUstep is really a nice tool, beyond just rudimentary
access. At least it keeps away from that crazy guesswork, trying to deal
with who I am.
If ever today turns out to really be a different day than yesterday ...
what are all those many watchdogs and history record graves good for,
anyway?
But, ok, the other day I gave it a try to convince the mozilla machine, that
it needs not store just _any_ detail except bookmarks to survive one
session.
No way.
If one wants the machine to stay just an isolated entity by itself, so one
has to freeze some state of the complete configuration, and replace the
current configuration with this one, over and over again. One cannot delete
the traces any more. So thank you very much for such a perfect inspection
tool into my privacy I never asked for.
Dan C
Feb 16, 2014, 12:30:59 PM2/16/14
to
On Sun, 16 Feb 2014 10:39:48 +0000, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
KDE sucks dick.
--
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".
"Bother!" said Pooh, as he stepped into the acceleration chamber.
Usenet Improvement Project: http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/
Thanks, Obama: http://brandybuck.site40.net/pics/politica/thanks.jpg
alistair
Feb 16, 2014, 1:39:04 PM2/16/14
to
On Sun, 16 Feb 2014 10:39:48 +0000, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
version, for simplicity. The newer versions (2.xx) are too involved. A
good alternative to Afterstep is Openbox. It is equally simple, easy to
configure, allows an empty screen and is fast.
The '..box' family of window managers are all pretty simple.
Alistair
b...@mails.at
Feb 16, 2014, 2:25:56 PM2/16/14
to
fvwm is my favorite window manager
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
xfce make a good job for a friend
mfg
bw1
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
mfg
bw1
Jim Diamond
Feb 16, 2014, 3:20:07 PM2/16/14
to
On 2014-02-16 at 12:38 AST, Piotr Isajew <pis...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> it does perfect job managing my workspace and doesn't interfere
> with my style of work.
I was wondering if I was the only one left using fvwm ;-)
I spent some time a year ago trying out a lot of WMs because of a
glitch in Java GUIs which fvwm refuses to work-around (according to
one of the fvwm devs, anyway).
Xfce was the only other WM which came close to being able to set
things up the way I have them with fvwm. (Admittedly, I could not
afford to spend a week or two playing with each of the WMs I tried,
so perhaps if I devoted my life to one of them I'd be able to make
them do what I want. But that's not going to happen; fvwm does what I
want without all that devotion.)
I think it is unfortunate that fvwm takes so much effort to set up,
because it seems to be far more configurable and flexible than the
other WMs (*), while being a lot less bloated than them, but I'm sure
most people look at the default config, go "blah!", take a quick look
at trying to configure it, and then move along.
(*) When the world went "wide-screen", one of the things I wanted to
do was to put my buttons/icons/taskbar/... stuff on one side of the
screen, so I wasn't wasting vertical real estate. But while a lot of
WMs pretend to allow you to do that, I couldn't get many to be very
usable that way. (Xfce is pretty good for that.)
Cheers.
Jim
> Dnia 16.02.2014 Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> napisał/a:
>> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
>
> I definitely vote for fvwm. It takes time to set it up, but then
>> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
>
> it does perfect job managing my workspace and doesn't interfere
> with my style of work.
I was wondering if I was the only one left using fvwm ;-)
I spent some time a year ago trying out a lot of WMs because of a
glitch in Java GUIs which fvwm refuses to work-around (according to
one of the fvwm devs, anyway).
Xfce was the only other WM which came close to being able to set
things up the way I have them with fvwm. (Admittedly, I could not
afford to spend a week or two playing with each of the WMs I tried,
so perhaps if I devoted my life to one of them I'd be able to make
them do what I want. But that's not going to happen; fvwm does what I
want without all that devotion.)
I think it is unfortunate that fvwm takes so much effort to set up,
because it seems to be far more configurable and flexible than the
other WMs (*), while being a lot less bloated than them, but I'm sure
most people look at the default config, go "blah!", take a quick look
at trying to configure it, and then move along.
(*) When the world went "wide-screen", one of the things I wanted to
do was to put my buttons/icons/taskbar/... stuff on one side of the
screen, so I wasn't wasting vertical real estate. But while a lot of
WMs pretend to allow you to do that, I couldn't get many to be very
usable that way. (Xfce is pretty good for that.)
Cheers.
Jim
Chick Tower
Feb 17, 2014, 2:50:04 PM2/17/14
to
On 2014-02-16, Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> wrote:
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> ...
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
>
> It could also be worth noting that I am relly not only looking for a
> simple window manager. As most users does not have root access the KDE
> functionality of detecting and supporting hot-plugged USB disks is really
> appreciated.
I use Fluxbox, but I don't pretend to be a normal user. Tastes vary.
> It could also be worth noting that I am relly not only looking for a
> simple window manager. As most users does not have root access the KDE
> functionality of detecting and supporting hot-plugged USB disks is really
> appreciated.
If you do want to try a WM that doesn't have auto-mounting facilities, I
have a copy of a udev rule that someone posted that mounts USB devices
automatically, using their labels (or a default name if no label). I
can send it to you. I forget who posted it, but I believe it was within
the last year, and from the comments it looks like something Loki might
write.
--
Chick Tower
For e-mail: aols2 DOT sent DOT towerboy AT xoxy DOT net
John McCue
Feb 17, 2014, 3:59:43 PM2/17/14
to
Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> wrote:
> I really appreciate the discussion in the thread "Choice of file system",
> that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after having used
> reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the same question
> about window managers:
>
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
Yes
> I really appreciate the discussion in the thread "Choice of file system",
> that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after having used
> reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the same question
> about window managers:
>
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
> Are you really old school using twm?
>
> Do you stick to the default KDE?
No, but when I need to use a 'strange' proprietary
> Do you stick to the default KDE?
application it works with KDE. Seems that application
has a rough time with 'just a' window manager.
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
between fvwm2 and vtwm depending upon my mood.
> I have been using KDE since Gnome was removed from Slackware and it has
> worked OK up to version 13.1. There have been some quirks about nepomuk
I hear nepomuk is going away in a near term future
relese of KDE
> regards Henrik
John
Martin
Feb 17, 2014, 4:20:18 PM2/17/14
to
On 02/16/2014 06:30 PM, Dan C wrote:
> KDE sucks dick.
nice try, but you won't talk me into going back to KDE ^^
ad OP:
using XFCE for now. tried cairo-dock for the eye candy but went back to
plain xfce4-panel for reasons of efficiency. For the same reason I put
the applications started most frequently on keyboard-shortcuts.
For the desktop, efficiency is everything, in the same way that for
filesystems data integrity is everything.
> KDE sucks dick.
nice try, but you won't talk me into going back to KDE ^^
ad OP:
using XFCE for now. tried cairo-dock for the eye candy but went back to
plain xfce4-panel for reasons of efficiency. For the same reason I put
the applications started most frequently on keyboard-shortcuts.
For the desktop, efficiency is everything, in the same way that for
filesystems data integrity is everything.
Henrik Carlqvist
Feb 17, 2014, 4:28:31 PM2/17/14
to
On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:50:04 +0000, Chick Tower wrote:
> If you do want to try a WM that doesn't have auto-mounting facilities, I
> have a copy of a udev rule that someone posted that mounts USB devices
> automatically, using their labels (or a default name if no label). I
> can send it to you. I forget who posted it, but I believe it was within
> the last year, and from the comments it looks like something Loki might
> write.
Thanks for the offer, but I think I will first try out XFCE and see how
> If you do want to try a WM that doesn't have auto-mounting facilities, I
> have a copy of a udev rule that someone posted that mounts USB devices
> automatically, using their labels (or a default name if no label). I
> can send it to you. I forget who posted it, but I believe it was within
> the last year, and from the comments it looks like something Loki might
> write.
it works with USB disks. If I remember right, the udev script was posted
to this group and mounted the disk when it was inserted and umounted the
disk after it had been removed. The problem with such an automatic
approach is that a disk should be umounted before it is removed, but udev
can't detect that a user is going to remove a disk in five seconds.
Aaron W. Hsu
Feb 17, 2014, 7:37:45 PM2/17/14
to
Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> writes:
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
good. Right now I prefer something more minimal, so I'm using dwm with a
couple of patches to get a nice minimal environment, coupled with a
distraction free Emacs and urxvt.
> I have been using KDE since Gnome was removed from Slackware and it has
> worked OK up to version 13.1. There have been some quirks about nepomuk
> sometimes filling up the users home partitions, but for most users KDE
> has worked fine once I system globally disabled nepomuk.
been receiving some love for Slackware 14.1. Gnome is a good desktop
environment from an user's standpoint, even if they have some technical
decisions which make them rather unfriendly to developers.
--
Aaron W. Hsu | arc...@sacrideo.us | http://www.sacrideo.us
לֵ֤ב חֲכָמִים֙ בְּבֵ֣ית אֵ֔בֶל וְלֵ֥ב כְּסִילִ֖ים בְּבֵ֥ית שִׂמְחָֽה׃
Aragorn
Feb 17, 2014, 8:14:47 PM2/17/14
to
On Tuesday 18 February 2014 01:37, Aaron W. Hsu conveyed the following
to alt.os.linux.slackware...
> Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> writes:
>
>> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
>> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really
> good. Right now I prefer something more minimal, so I'm using dwm with
> a couple of patches to get a nice minimal environment, coupled with a
> distraction free Emacs and urxvt.
>
>> I have been using KDE since Gnome was removed from Slackware and it
>> has worked OK up to version 13.1. There have been some quirks about
>> nepomuk sometimes filling up the users home partitions, but for most
>> users KDE has worked fine once I system globally disabled nepomuk.
>
> Speaking of Gnome, I am rather excited to see that the latest Gnome
> has been receiving some love for Slackware 14.1. Gnome is a good
> desktop environment from an user's standpoint, even if they have some
> technical decisions which make them rather unfriendly to developers.
Please be advised that the latest GNOME version (i.e. 3.8 and above)
require systemd as the init system. Slackware does not use systemd
(yet) at this point in time. (And for its own good, it shouldn't go
there either.)
The decision is purely political/strategic. GNOME is developed at
RedHat, and so is systemd. By forcing the systemd dependency in GNOME,
every other distro that wishes to support GNOME will have to follow
RedHat's lead.
--
= Aragorn =
http://www.linuxcounter.net - registrant #223157
to alt.os.linux.slackware...
> Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> writes:
>
>> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
>> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really
> good. Right now I prefer something more minimal, so I'm using dwm with
> a couple of patches to get a nice minimal environment, coupled with a
> distraction free Emacs and urxvt.
>
>> I have been using KDE since Gnome was removed from Slackware and it
>> has worked OK up to version 13.1. There have been some quirks about
>> nepomuk sometimes filling up the users home partitions, but for most
>> users KDE has worked fine once I system globally disabled nepomuk.
>
> Speaking of Gnome, I am rather excited to see that the latest Gnome
> has been receiving some love for Slackware 14.1. Gnome is a good
> desktop environment from an user's standpoint, even if they have some
> technical decisions which make them rather unfriendly to developers.
require systemd as the init system. Slackware does not use systemd
(yet) at this point in time. (And for its own good, it shouldn't go
there either.)
The decision is purely political/strategic. GNOME is developed at
RedHat, and so is systemd. By forcing the systemd dependency in GNOME,
every other distro that wishes to support GNOME will have to follow
RedHat's lead.
--
= Aragorn =
http://www.linuxcounter.net - registrant #223157
Henrik Carlqvist
Feb 18, 2014, 1:33:02 AM2/18/14
to
On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:37:45 -0500, Aaron W. Hsu wrote:
> If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really good.
That would really have been the easy route. With almost all users used
> If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really good.
with KDE since before and not many visual differences between KDE in
Slackware 13.1 and 14.1 everyone would feel at home from start.
Unfortunately, KDE in slackware 14.1 seems buggy to an almost unusable
level. It might even be, that after evaluating 14.1 the decision will be
to stick with 13.1 and hope for a better KDE 14.1 or 15.0 in the future.
Last week I found two different ways for plasma-desktop to hang to an
unusable state. When I got back to work on monday, the panel was in a
somewhat more useful state, but buggy in a way I had never seen the KDE
panel to bug out before.
It seemed as if the graphics in the panel did not update unless I clicked
in the panel. The clock stood still and showed the time several minutes
ago. Clicking in the clock showed the calendar and also updated the clock
which after that again would stand still.
In the system tray I had added gnubiff with a custom animated icon
showing if I got mail. The animated icon stood still.
I have configured the virtual desktop to show small rectangles for
different windows on different desktops. Opening a new window on a
desktop did not give any new rectangle in the virtual desktop. Clicking
in the virtual desktop got it refreshed so that it showed the rectangle.
For me this has been 3 different cases of KDE bugging out in a week. If I
start to distribute Slackware 14.1 with KDE to about 50 users, I will
probably get bitten with about 150 KDE support cases every week. As I am
supposed to work with other things I can not allow that to happen. Maybe
I can say "Look, Slackware 14.1 looks like this with XFCE. You are still
able to use KDE, but if you choose to do so you are on your own."
Robert Komar
Feb 18, 2014, 3:49:21 AM2/18/14
to
Yes. I started using fvwm on decstations in 1993, and then in
Slackware in 1994, and haven't changed since. It took me ages
to get the config file just right, but I've been able to leave it
alone over the last 15 years or so.
I recently installed slack on an underpowered eeepc netbook that
has no 3D graphics acceleration support. It's amazing how much
zippier it feels using a window manager that doesn't require
compositing.
I'm glad to see so many others using fvwm2, too, since that means
it will likely stay in the slack distro.
Cheers,
Rob Komar
Slackware in 1994, and haven't changed since. It took me ages
to get the config file just right, but I've been able to leave it
alone over the last 15 years or so.
I recently installed slack on an underpowered eeepc netbook that
has no 3D graphics acceleration support. It's amazing how much
zippier it feels using a window manager that doesn't require
compositing.
I'm glad to see so many others using fvwm2, too, since that means
it will likely stay in the slack distro.
Cheers,
Rob Komar
Al
Feb 18, 2014, 7:25:06 AM2/18/14
to
fvwm
Jim Diamond
Feb 18, 2014, 8:03:43 AM2/18/14
to
On 2014-02-18 at 02:33 AST, Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:37:45 -0500, Aaron W. Hsu wrote:
>> If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really good.
For some definition of "traditional". Not mine, but someone's.
> On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:37:45 -0500, Aaron W. Hsu wrote:
>> If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really good.
> Unfortunately, KDE in slackware 14.1 seems buggy to an almost unusable
> level. It might even be, that after evaluating 14.1 the decision will be
> to stick with 13.1 and hope for a better KDE 14.1 or 15.0 in the future.
of KDE 3. There are Slackware packages for a very old version
(probably not very usable on Slackware 14.1), but a new release is
"just around the corner". I've built it from the git sources, and the
programs I've used (kmix, ksnapshot, korganizer, k3b, maybe a couple
of others) all seem to work fine. But I never really liked KDE
"itself", so I haven't tried out the trinity version of it.
If you are interested in compiling it and trying it you can send me
e-mail and I'll send you some info on how you can obtain and build
it.
Cheers.
Jim
root
Feb 18, 2014, 8:23:42 AM2/18/14
to
package over when I update Slackware.
Henrik Carlqvist
Feb 18, 2014, 2:25:34 PM2/18/14
to
On Tue, 18 Feb 2014 09:03:43 -0400, Jim Diamond wrote:
> Are you familiar with the trinity desktop environment?
Yes, I have heard of it, but never tried it myself. The closest I got was
> Are you familiar with the trinity desktop environment?
when I was running KDE3 in Slackware 12.
Today I tried to reconfigure to XFCE as most people here have suggested.
So far I like what I see. It is a little bit less eye-candy and
unpolished than KDE, but very configurable in a way which much reminds me
of how Gnome could be configured in Slackware when it was included.
If I later find that XFCE will not be good enough I might also be willing
to install some external window manager/desktop environment to try it out.
Tomasz Konojacki
Feb 18, 2014, 3:23:16 PM2/18/14
to
Hello!
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
Probably I'm a little bit biased since I'm maintaining XView fork, but
I'm in love with OLVWM (OPEN LOOK Virtual Window Manager). IMHO it's
rather ascethic but pretty, also its virtual desktop feature is flawless.
Of course, due to its age, it has a few shortcomings - most importantly,
it has no support for unicode.
Cheers,
Tomasz
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
I'm in love with OLVWM (OPEN LOOK Virtual Window Manager). IMHO it's
rather ascethic but pretty, also its virtual desktop feature is flawless.
Of course, due to its age, it has a few shortcomings - most importantly,
it has no support for unicode.
Cheers,
Tomasz
Jerry Peters
Feb 18, 2014, 4:18:32 PM2/18/14
to
Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:50:04 +0000, Chick Tower wrote:
>> If you do want to try a WM that doesn't have auto-mounting facilities, I
>> have a copy of a udev rule that someone posted that mounts USB devices
>> automatically, using their labels (or a default name if no label). I
>> can send it to you. I forget who posted it, but I believe it was within
>> the last year, and from the comments it looks like something Loki might
>> write.
>
> Thanks for the offer, but I think I will first try out XFCE and see how
> it works with USB disks. If I remember right, the udev script was posted
> to this group and mounted the disk when it was inserted and umounted the
> disk after it had been removed. The problem with such an automatic
> approach is that a disk should be umounted before it is removed, but udev
> can't detect that a user is going to remove a disk in five seconds.
>
> regards Henrik
I have a udev rule + script which doesn't mount the disk but creates
> On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:50:04 +0000, Chick Tower wrote:
>> If you do want to try a WM that doesn't have auto-mounting facilities, I
>> have a copy of a udev rule that someone posted that mounts USB devices
>> automatically, using their labels (or a default name if no label). I
>> can send it to you. I forget who posted it, but I believe it was within
>> the last year, and from the comments it looks like something Loki might
>> write.
>
> Thanks for the offer, but I think I will first try out XFCE and see how
> it works with USB disks. If I remember right, the udev script was posted
> to this group and mounted the disk when it was inserted and umounted the
> disk after it had been removed. The problem with such an automatic
> approach is that a disk should be umounted before it is removed, but udev
> can't detect that a user is going to remove a disk in five seconds.
>
> regards Henrik
predictable device names. These can then be mounted via fstab entries
with the 'users' attribute. This way *I* control when the mount/umount
happens.
John McCue
Feb 18, 2014, 6:14:51 PM2/18/14
to
Tomasz Konojacki <m...@xenu.tk> wrote:
> Hello!
>
>> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
>> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> Probably I'm a little bit biased since I'm maintaining XView fork, but
> I'm in love with OLVWM (OPEN LOOK Virtual Window Manager). IMHO it's
> rather ascethic but pretty, also its virtual desktop feature is flawless.
Yes, I miss the XView package also, that was disappointed
> Hello!
>
>> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
>> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> Probably I'm a little bit biased since I'm maintaining XView fork, but
> I'm in love with OLVWM (OPEN LOOK Virtual Window Manager). IMHO it's
> rather ascethic but pretty, also its virtual desktop feature is flawless.
when I saw it move to pasture ages ago. I did my best to
keep it going, but sometime around 12.x I started having
issues. I was using a port from 'flame', but his site is
now gone.
> Of course, due to its age, it has a few shortcomings - most importantly,
> it has no support for unicode.
I heard XView cannot work on a 64 bit system. But I
did not investagate it since I decided to move on :(
> Cheers,
> Tomasz
>
John
Aaron W. Hsu
Feb 18, 2014, 7:26:21 PM2/18/14
to
Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> writes:
> On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:37:45 -0500, Aaron W. Hsu wrote:
>> If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really good.
>
> That would really have been the easy route. With almost all users used
> with KDE since before and not many visual differences between KDE in
> Slackware 13.1 and 14.1 everyone would feel at home from start.
>
> Unfortunately, KDE in slackware 14.1 seems buggy to an almost unusable
> level. It might even be, that after evaluating 14.1 the decision will be
> to stick with 13.1 and hope for a better KDE 14.1 or 15.0 in the future.
Have you checked out AlienBOB's KDE updates? He releases new versions of
> On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:37:45 -0500, Aaron W. Hsu wrote:
>> If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really good.
>
> That would really have been the easy route. With almost all users used
> with KDE since before and not many visual differences between KDE in
> Slackware 13.1 and 14.1 everyone would feel at home from start.
>
> Unfortunately, KDE in slackware 14.1 seems buggy to an almost unusable
> level. It might even be, that after evaluating 14.1 the decision will be
> to stick with 13.1 and hope for a better KDE 14.1 or 15.0 in the future.
KDE for -Current and 14.1. These updates might fix your issues.
Aaron W. Hsu
Feb 18, 2014, 7:28:46 PM2/18/14
to
Aragorn <thor...@telenet.be.invalid> writes:
> Please be advised that the latest GNOME version (i.e. 3.8 and above)
> require systemd as the init system. Slackware does not use systemd
> (yet) at this point in time. (And for its own good, it shouldn't go
> there either.)
I am not sure which release it was, but one of the later releases, I
> Please be advised that the latest GNOME version (i.e. 3.8 and above)
> require systemd as the init system. Slackware does not use systemd
> (yet) at this point in time. (And for its own good, it shouldn't go
> there either.)
want to say 3.8 released by the Dropline Gnome project had the ability
to install a package that did not use systemd, or did use it, depending
on your preference. I do not know if the latest 3.10 Beta from them
requires systemd or not.
> The decision is purely political/strategic. GNOME is developed at
> RedHat, and so is systemd. By forcing the systemd dependency in GNOME,
> every other distro that wishes to support GNOME will have to follow
> RedHat's lead.
debate. Unfortunately, systemd does have some interesting advantages,
but it certainly does create problems for UNIX-like systems, such as
Slackware or the BSDs.
Henrik Carlqvist
Feb 19, 2014, 1:31:15 AM2/19/14
to
On Tue, 18 Feb 2014 21:18:32 +0000, Jerry Peters wrote:
> I have a udev rule + script which doesn't mount the disk but creates
> predictable device names. These can then be mounted via fstab entries
> with the 'users' attribute. This way *I* control when the mount/umount
> happens.
Yes, that would work OK. It very much resembles how I used to give users
> I have a udev rule + script which doesn't mount the disk but creates
> predictable device names. These can then be mounted via fstab entries
> with the 'users' attribute. This way *I* control when the mount/umount
> happens.
access to USB disks before hotplug/udev/hald simplified things for
desktop environment users. The minor drawback of such a solution was that
if many USB disks were connected at once to the same machine, at least
one line for each USB disk were needed in fstab. So the number of entries
in fstab had to be choosen for some "worst case" scenario.
So far I like how XFCE handles USB disks. Instead of mounting them below
/media as KDE does XFCE mounts them below /run/ at a somewhat longer path
including the username. With XFCE there is no need for fstab entries.
Henrik Carlqvist
Feb 19, 2014, 1:45:19 AM2/19/14
to
On Tue, 18 Feb 2014 19:26:21 -0500, Aaron W. Hsu wrote:
> Have you checked out AlienBOB's KDE updates? He releases new versions of
> KDE for -Current and 14.1. These updates might fix your issues.
No, I haven't. Right now XFCE is my main track, but if XFCE somehow shows
> Have you checked out AlienBOB's KDE updates? He releases new versions of
> KDE for -Current and 14.1. These updates might fix your issues.
up not to be good enough those updated KDE packages might be worth a try.
The major advantage of using KDE would be that most users are used to
that environment since before. With my customizations of Slackware I
change KDEHOME to ~/.kde_slack131 and ~/.kde_slack141 so they will not be
able to keep their settings, but at least they will be in a familiar
environment. During the years, I have found out the hard way that KDEHOME
is not allways backwards compatible and even when it is probably not
forward compatible between different KDE versions. For that reason I
customize /etc/profile.d/kde.*sh.
I really appreciate the work that AlienBOB does, most of all I like his
multilib packages. However, the drawback with packages from AlienBOB
compared with standard packages is that AlienBOB only updates packages
for current and stable. When the next stable version of Slackware comes I
might stop getting security updates of those packages. If we switch over
to Slackware 14.1 it will probably be our main platform for about 3 years
and a few machines might keep running 14.1 for 6 years.
Henrik Carlqvist
Feb 19, 2014, 1:49:00 AM2/19/14
to
On Tue, 18 Feb 2014 21:23:16 +0100, Tomasz Konojacki wrote:
> I'm in love with OLVWM
Ah, that brings memories :-) When we started running Slackware 3.0 most
> I'm in love with OLVWM
users came from SunOS/Solaris and were familiar with OLVWM. Some kept
using OLVWM, some switched to FVWM which then were more the standard
Slackware choice.
Jerry Peters
Feb 19, 2014, 3:56:09 PM2/19/14
to
Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Feb 2014 21:18:32 +0000, Jerry Peters wrote:
>> I have a udev rule + script which doesn't mount the disk but creates
>> predictable device names. These can then be mounted via fstab entries
>> with the 'users' attribute. This way *I* control when the mount/umount
>> happens.
>
> Yes, that would work OK. It very much resembles how I used to give users
> access to USB disks before hotplug/udev/hald simplified things for
> desktop environment users. The minor drawback of such a solution was that
> if many USB disks were connected at once to the same machine, at least
> one line for each USB disk were needed in fstab. So the number of entries
> in fstab had to be choosen for some "worst case" scenario.
I currently have 2: /usd1 & /usd2 in fstab, but the script allows for
> On Tue, 18 Feb 2014 21:18:32 +0000, Jerry Peters wrote:
>> I have a udev rule + script which doesn't mount the disk but creates
>> predictable device names. These can then be mounted via fstab entries
>> with the 'users' attribute. This way *I* control when the mount/umount
>> happens.
>
> Yes, that would work OK. It very much resembles how I used to give users
> access to USB disks before hotplug/udev/hald simplified things for
> desktop environment users. The minor drawback of such a solution was that
> if many USB disks were connected at once to the same machine, at least
> one line for each USB disk were needed in fstab. So the number of entries
> in fstab had to be choosen for some "worst case" scenario.
9, which could be easily changed.
>
> So far I like how XFCE handles USB disks. Instead of mounting them below
> /media as KDE does XFCE mounts them below /run/ at a somewhat longer path
> including the username. With XFCE there is no need for fstab entries.
major usage (that's why the mount points are in /).
I'll admit to an aversion to graphical file managers; when I need to
negotiate a deeply nested directory tree I use mc.
Eli the Bearded
Feb 19, 2014, 8:40:03 PM2/19/14
to
In alt.os.linux.slackware,
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
I'm using IceWM. I settled on it a few years ago and designed myself a
theme optimized for minimal window decorations and have stuck with it
since. IceWM is pretty good at giving me a few minimal controls and
features and then staying out of my way. Fvwm could probably do that
if suitably configured, but I haven't put the work into configuring
it to my tastes.
Prior to IceWM I was using Sawfish, which was extremely flexible, but
then I ran into an upgrade issue with it and was not up to the lisp
hacking to get it working.
Elijah
------
not an emacs user and not all that into lisp
Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.C...@deadspam.com> wrote:
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
I'm still on 14.0, but I'll answer anyway.
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
theme optimized for minimal window decorations and have stuck with it
since. IceWM is pretty good at giving me a few minimal controls and
features and then staying out of my way. Fvwm could probably do that
if suitably configured, but I haven't put the work into configuring
it to my tastes.
Prior to IceWM I was using Sawfish, which was extremely flexible, but
then I ran into an upgrade issue with it and was not up to the lisp
hacking to get it working.
Elijah
------
not an emacs user and not all that into lisp
rkfb
Feb 20, 2014, 9:18:54 AM2/20/14
to
On Sun, 16 Feb 2014, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
> Thanks for all the replies! So far everyone seems to agree that XFCE is
> the way to go and I will switch from KDE to XFCE next week to test it out.
>
> Maybe, in Slack14.1 XFCE even is the default, it might only have been me
> who reused my old custom /var/log/setup/setup.xwmconfig to link
> xinitrc.kde to xinitrc without any qeustions asked. If I like XFCE i will
> alter my setup.xwmconfig to link to xfce instead without any questions.
>
> I have customized the installation process to minimize the number of
> question asked during installation and not asking any questions at all
> during the configuration phase after packages have been installed.
>
> regards Henrik
>
I use TWM as my main WM, just selected it to see what it was like and it
turns out I love it. Read up on it everywhere I could and customised my
.twmrc and .xinitrc files left right and centre. Use it on a daily basis
as my main desktop.
regards,
--
Robert
> Thanks for all the replies! So far everyone seems to agree that XFCE is
> the way to go and I will switch from KDE to XFCE next week to test it out.
>
> Maybe, in Slack14.1 XFCE even is the default, it might only have been me
> who reused my old custom /var/log/setup/setup.xwmconfig to link
> xinitrc.kde to xinitrc without any qeustions asked. If I like XFCE i will
> alter my setup.xwmconfig to link to xfce instead without any questions.
>
> I have customized the installation process to minimize the number of
> question asked during installation and not asking any questions at all
> during the configuration phase after packages have been installed.
>
> regards Henrik
>
I use TWM as my main WM, just selected it to see what it was like and it
turns out I love it. Read up on it everywhere I could and customised my
.twmrc and .xinitrc files left right and centre. Use it on a daily basis
as my main desktop.
regards,
--
Robert
Mr. Mxyztplk
Feb 20, 2014, 3:44:51 PM2/20/14
to
Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
>
xdm with twm or xfce is usually how I roll if I'm in Slackware runlevel 4,
but at runlevel 3 those are the same two I'd fire off from startx most of
the time too.
>
xdm with twm or xfce is usually how I roll if I'm in Slackware runlevel 4,
but at runlevel 3 those are the same two I'd fire off from startx most of
the time too.
Tomasz Konojacki
Feb 20, 2014, 4:07:35 PM2/20/14
to
> Yes, I miss the XView package also, that was disappointed
> when I saw it move to pasture ages ago. I did my best to
> keep it going, but sometime around 12.x I started having
> issues. I was using a port from 'flame', but his site is
> now gone.
XView does not currently work under 64-bit systems, however I'm planning
> when I saw it move to pasture ages ago. I did my best to
> keep it going, but sometime around 12.x I started having
> issues. I was using a port from 'flame', but his site is
> now gone.
to port it. Of course it will take some time, because XView is pretty
big, but I hope we will see 64-bit XView this year.
Current version works without any issues under latest 32-bit Slackware
(and many other systems), I maintain an SlackBuild, you can find it here:
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.1/libraries/xview/
Also, while 64-bit XView doesn't work at all, it compiles without any
errors and olvwm works OK, because olvwm doesn't use XView. To build it,
delete following lines from SlackBuild:
if [ "$ARCH" != "i486" ]; then
echo 'Currently only i486 is supported!'
exit 1
fi
Tomasz
Henrik Carlqvist
Feb 20, 2014, 5:42:54 PM2/20/14
to
of rc.local to get it in runlevel 3.
My main reason to prefer runlevel 3 is that it gives more virtual
consoles. But as allways, you can configure Slackware to do whatever you
want. It would also be possible to edit /etc/inittab to add more virtual
consoles to runlevel 4.
Ewald Pfau
Feb 20, 2014, 7:55:43 PM2/20/14
to
Jerry Peters <je...@example.invalid>:
> I have a udev rule + script which doesn't mount the disk but creates
> predictable device names. These can then be mounted via fstab entries
> with the 'users' attribute. This way *I* control when the mount/umount
> happens.
Maybe I should give it a try to play a bit with this one. For now I've just
the very simple and transparent approach: root ist needed for mounting and
for launching the networking. If no root terminal is open and no extra
device and no network is active, so it should reliably be a perfectly
isolated machine (even more so, if the working drive is crypted).
Would be nice to know how to switch off the approaches for the other way
round, when devices launch themselves. Should be easy, as it is just
omissions, I guess, but it seems I'm quite in a minority with this.
> I have a udev rule + script which doesn't mount the disk but creates
> predictable device names. These can then be mounted via fstab entries
> with the 'users' attribute. This way *I* control when the mount/umount
> happens.
the very simple and transparent approach: root ist needed for mounting and
for launching the networking. If no root terminal is open and no extra
device and no network is active, so it should reliably be a perfectly
isolated machine (even more so, if the working drive is crypted).
Would be nice to know how to switch off the approaches for the other way
round, when devices launch themselves. Should be easy, as it is just
omissions, I guess, but it seems I'm quite in a minority with this.
Michael P. O'Connor
Feb 21, 2014, 6:33:24 PM2/21/14
to
There are some of us FVWM users out there, I use FVWM, using the same
setup I have used since 97. a button bar on the left lower side of my
screen, and a 16 page pager in the upper right side of the screen (4x4)
I usually have my start up launch 4 xterms also.
I like that FVWM uses less CPU cycles vs the other massive WMs (gnome or
kde)
I don't really worry about the Java bug as I just run my java stuff on a
separate page, well all my tasks are run on their own page from the
pager, web browser is always on 2x1, my root and sys admin stuff is on
4x4, chat is usually on 3x4, and newsgroup reading is 4x2, and email is
on 2x1.
setup I have used since 97. a button bar on the left lower side of my
screen, and a 16 page pager in the upper right side of the screen (4x4)
I usually have my start up launch 4 xterms also.
I like that FVWM uses less CPU cycles vs the other massive WMs (gnome or
kde)
I don't really worry about the Java bug as I just run my java stuff on a
separate page, well all my tasks are run on their own page from the
pager, web browser is always on 2x1, my root and sys admin stuff is on
4x4, chat is usually on 3x4, and newsgroup reading is 4x2, and email is
on 2x1.
Mike Spencer
Feb 23, 2014, 3:11:57 PM2/23/14
to
rkfb <rk...@openbox.slacknet> writes:
> I use TWM as my main WM, just selected it to see what it was like
> and it turns out I love it. Read up on it everywhere I could and
> customised my .twmrc and .xinitrc files left right and centre. Use
> it on a daily basis as my main desktop.
Quickly dumpd KDE, switched from Caldera to Slack 8 at earliest
opportunity.
I'm still using Slack 11 and 12.1 but will use twm when I get around
to upgrading to 14 or whatever.
FWIW, HTH etc.
--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
Karel Venken
Feb 23, 2014, 4:19:20 PM2/23/14
to
Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
>>...<<
I am a rather new user (only a few years), so taking my limited
experience into account ;-)
On my desktop system I use XFCE as I had some strange hangs from time to
time with KDE, probably because I moved my home to another Slackware
NIS/NFS server.
On my rather old laptop (Dell Latitude D510) I use icewm as it is among
the fastest and has the features I need. I did create the menus for
icewm myself manually. Just editing a bunch of files, for which the
syntax is much more clear as the xfce and kde stuff.
K.
>>...<<
I am a rather new user (only a few years), so taking my limited
experience into account ;-)
On my desktop system I use XFCE as I had some strange hangs from time to
time with KDE, probably because I moved my home to another Slackware
NIS/NFS server.
On my rather old laptop (Dell Latitude D510) I use icewm as it is among
the fastest and has the features I need. I did create the menus for
icewm myself manually. Just editing a bunch of files, for which the
syntax is much more clear as the xfce and kde stuff.
K.
Tralfaz
Mar 2, 2014, 8:51:20 AM3/2/14
to
On Sun, 16 Feb 2014 10:39:48 +0000, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
> I really appreciate the discussion in the thread "Choice of file
> system",
> that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after having used
> reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the same question
> about window managers:
>
> Do you stick to the default KDE?
>
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
>
> regards Henrik
I've used KDE since I started using Linux in 2000 (SuSE 7.3 at the
time). I couldn't and can't stand the 'blurry-looking' soft icons of
Gnome (and KDE's are almost that way now, which is a shame. I truly miss
the sharp, clewar icons of KDE3!).
For the most part KDE has never really given me any trouble in all
these years, at least nothing that was relatively easy to fix on my own
or ask about and get an answer/fix for.
I personally think it's ridiculous that with all the troubles that the M
$ OS gives, constantly and consistantly, why does someone (like you in
this instance) complain about a DE that *might* give other users (with
completely different hardware than yours pretty much for all of them?)
the same problem you seem to have. Why not get the 'fix' for the small
problem(s) *you* had, and if it pops up on the users' system(s), tell the
'users' how to solve it...they'd have to do the same thing if they were
on that air-waste of an OS M$ just the same if something 'happened'.
> I really appreciate the discussion in the thread "Choice of file
> system",
> that discussion made me jump to ext4 in Slackware 14.1 after having used
> reiserfs for many years. Now I'm going to try to ask the same question
> about window managers:
>
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> To those of you who are running latest stable Slackware 14.1, which
> window manager(s) do you prefer?
>
> Are you still an old school fvwm user?
>
> Are you really old school using twm?
>
>
> Do you stick to the default KDE?
>
> Do you prefer the included and rather full featured XFCE?
>
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
>
<SNIP>
> Do you install some third party window manager like enlightenment?
>
>
> regards Henrik
I've used KDE since I started using Linux in 2000 (SuSE 7.3 at the
time). I couldn't and can't stand the 'blurry-looking' soft icons of
Gnome (and KDE's are almost that way now, which is a shame. I truly miss
the sharp, clewar icons of KDE3!).
For the most part KDE has never really given me any trouble in all
these years, at least nothing that was relatively easy to fix on my own
or ask about and get an answer/fix for.
I personally think it's ridiculous that with all the troubles that the M
$ OS gives, constantly and consistantly, why does someone (like you in
this instance) complain about a DE that *might* give other users (with
completely different hardware than yours pretty much for all of them?)
the same problem you seem to have. Why not get the 'fix' for the small
problem(s) *you* had, and if it pops up on the users' system(s), tell the
'users' how to solve it...they'd have to do the same thing if they were
on that air-waste of an OS M$ just the same if something 'happened'.
Tralfaz
Mar 2, 2014, 9:19:05 AM3/2/14
to
On Tue, 18 Feb 2014 06:33:02 +0000, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:37:45 -0500, Aaron W. Hsu wrote:
>> If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really good.
>
> That would really have been the easy route. With almost all users used
> with KDE since before and not many visual differences between KDE in
> Slackware 13.1 and 14.1 everyone would feel at home from start.
>
> Unfortunately, KDE in slackware 14.1 seems buggy to an almost unusable
> level. It might even be, that after evaluating 14.1 the decision will be
> to stick with 13.1 and hope for a better KDE 14.1 or 15.0 in the future.
Again, how can you say this and make it sound like it's happening to
> On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:37:45 -0500, Aaron W. Hsu wrote:
>> If I want a traditional desktop environment, KDE is really good.
>
> That would really have been the easy route. With almost all users used
> with KDE since before and not many visual differences between KDE in
> Slackware 13.1 and 14.1 everyone would feel at home from start.
>
> Unfortunately, KDE in slackware 14.1 seems buggy to an almost unusable
> level. It might even be, that after evaluating 14.1 the decision will be
> to stick with 13.1 and hope for a better KDE 14.1 or 15.0 in the future.
everyone else also. It isn't. I've tried and like XFCE and even like
Enlightenment (I even tried the very latest E18). Unfortunately *for me*
they're just a little too unwieldy and not quite as easy to use, and yes
I gave them each almost a week of use to try and see if I could get used
to the idiosyncracies of them, but it just couldn't quite do it for me. I
don't go around telling the world that they both "suck dick", though I
could by the logic many here seem to go by.
>
> Last week I found two different ways for plasma-desktop to hang to an
> unusable state. When I got back to work on monday, the panel was in a
> somewhat more useful state, but buggy in a way I had never seen the KDE
> panel to bug out before.
have been better to simply reinstall 14.1? Be honest about it.
>
> It seemed as if the graphics in the panel did not update unless I
> clicked in the panel. The clock stood still and showed the time several
> minutes ago. Clicking in the clock showed the calendar and also updated
> the clock which after that again would stand still.
>
> In the system tray I had added gnubiff with a custom animated icon
> showing if I got mail. The animated icon stood still.
>
> I have configured the virtual desktop to show small rectangles for
> different windows on different desktops. Opening a new window on a
> desktop did not give any new rectangle in the virtual desktop. Clicking
> in the virtual desktop got it refreshed so that it showed the rectangle.
to say that the two times I tried ATI cards with my linux (once with SuSE
9.3 IIRR, and once with 11.3) I was constantly having troubles, in the
first instance I couldn't even get it to the point I could see anything
on my screen, no matter what I tried myself and from other suggestions
from innumerable people. The second instance simply wouldn't give me a
screen better than 800x600 as if I were back in 1997 using Win 3.1 or
something.
I've always had good things to say about nvidia cards, but still not
quite happy enough with the opensource drivers to keep them installed and
always use the blacklist nouveau and install the nvidia proprietary
driver and it has never failed me yet.
Either way, it doesn't sound like *just* a KDE problem...it *could*
possibly be, but I seriously doubt it.
>
> For me this has been 3 different cases of KDE bugging out in a week. If
> I start to distribute Slackware 14.1 with KDE to about 50 users, I will
> probably get bitten with about 150 KDE support cases every week. As I am
> supposed to work with other things I can not allow that to happen. Maybe
> I can say "Look, Slackware 14.1 looks like this with XFCE. You are still
> able to use KDE, but if you choose to do so you are on your own."
>
> regards Henrik
your nose at "the easy route", yet here you are shying away from the
possibility of a little hard work with some people having problems which
arose on *your* system (that you need to tell us what you did to fix it)
and may not happen on anyone elses systems. If you're going to take the
responsibility of being in charge of 50 other peoples' systems, you need
to not complain about what *might* happen. I'd sure not keep a admin who
complained about 'maybe's' and 'could be's' and 'might's' unless it was
proven that it *will* happen no matter what system and who uses it or how
it was used, or if I wasn't told that it was a 'fixable' situation that
took all of an hour or two.
I'm not trying or meaning to sound like a KDE cheerleader, because I
wish with all my being that it never went past KDE3.x, as KDE4 just
doesn't have the same nice look and feel and intuitiveness that it once
had in the past, but I have to grudgingly admit that it's improving and
quite useable for me at least.
John McCue
Mar 2, 2014, 9:56:57 AM3/2/14
to
Tomasz Konojacki <m...@xenu.tk> wrote:
<snip>
setup a 32 bit system to try it out.
Interesting, did not know that olvwm would work OK.
>
<snip>
> Tomasz
>
Thanks for you efforts
John
<snip>
> Current version works without any issues under latest 32-bit Slackware
> (and many other systems), I maintain an SlackBuild, you can find it here:
>
> http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.1/libraries/xview/
Never noticed it in slackbuilds. Will need to
> (and many other systems), I maintain an SlackBuild, you can find it here:
>
> http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.1/libraries/xview/
setup a 32 bit system to try it out.
>
> Also, while 64-bit XView doesn't work at all, it compiles without any
> errors and olvwm works OK, because olvwm doesn't use XView.
<snip>
> Also, while 64-bit XView doesn't work at all, it compiles without any
> errors and olvwm works OK, because olvwm doesn't use XView.
Interesting, did not know that olvwm would work OK.
>
<snip>
> Tomasz
>
Thanks for you efforts
John
Aragorn
Mar 2, 2014, 10:47:29 AM3/2/14
to
On Sunday 02 March 2014 15:19, Tralfaz conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux.slackware...
> [...] I've tried and like XFCE and even like Enlightenment (I even
The thing is that KDE comes set up *out-of-the-box* with a roughly
Windows-like appearance, because that's what the developers and package
maintainers suspect that most people coming from the Windows world will
want to have on their screen.
Now, with that in mind, the name "KDE" gets equated with "Windows" by
elitists who feel that they have to be "special" in some way by choosing
something "that doesn't look like Windows". This is especially true
among those particular elitists who have been born with both prejudice
and disdain embedded into their genes.
Like you, I have tried various desktop environments and standalone
window managers over the years, and although I now use Enlightenment
(DR16) on my very old and under-spec'ed laptop (whenever I do need a GUI
on that), I have also been using KDE ever since my very first GNU/Linux
installation, back in 1999. And it is to date still the most easily
configurable and most customizable of all desktop environments I've seen
so far, not to mention - albeit that this *is* subjective - that I also
find it the most aesthetically pleasing one, courtesy of it being built
on the Qt widget sets.
KDE 4 was pushed way too soon by the distro packagers. Some - e.g.
Gentoo - even went so far as to deliberately break KDE 3 "because it was
no longer in active development" in order to push the users onto KDE 4,
unless they wanted to go with any of the other desktop environments or
window managers. I myself stuck with KDE 3 for as long as I could,
because I wanted to await the stage of KDE 4's development where it
became just as usable as the KDE 3.5.10 version I myself was using.
At present, I am using KDE 4.6.5 - that's already old, by technology's
standards - and although it does have a few small bugs, it /is/ now
indeed *very usable.* Furthermore, even though it came set up with
quite an unpleasing appearance (in my personal taste), I have managed to
tweak and tune it to be *exactly what I want* in a desktop environment
that I have to work with.
I've done that by, among other things, installing the Bespin theme, and
the included X-Bar widget, which adds a global menu to a panel - this
requires that you create an extra panel at the top, of course. Some of
the stuff from the lower panel was relocated to the top panel, such as
the main KDE menu icon, the clock, a bookmarks icon, the System Settings
icon and a window list icon. The bottom panel has a screenshot icon, a
virtual desktop pager (with 12 virtual desktops), the task manager, a
few icons for stuff that I need to bring up fast and more than once at
the same time - e.g. Firefox, Konqueror, Dolphin and KWrite - plus the
system tray, which I've customized to always show certain icons (even
when they were not there by default) and to permanently hide certain
other icons, and then finally there is also a CPU and memory load widget
which, when clicked, brings up the KDE System Monitor, and lastly, a
calculator widget which pops up from the panel but stays attached to it.
I've also customized the colors, font sizes, the way the running tasks
are shown in the task manager, the window borders (with a custom button
arrangement) and I use a single mouse click for everything - which is
definitely not Windows-like.
Having some very dark themed graphical interface with high contrast
yellow, red or fluorescent green text and over-the-top window borders
with a goth theme and some cyberpunk wallpaper may look cool in movies
about "l33t /-/4c|{3rz" - you might want to throw in Angelina Jolie for
increased viewer ratings - or maybe it'll give you extra bragging rights
at a LAN party or a gaming fest - you /do/ of course have windows and
many differently colored fluorescent lights in your computer housing,
right? - but for me, GNU/Linux is the only operating system I'm using on
my computers, and I use my computers for doing "productive stuff".
They're not bragging or gaming machines, and I'm not auditioning my
machines for any Hollywood productions either. And that means that the
GUI I use on my machines must be both usable/functional to me /and/ look
aesthetic (in my taste) at the same time.
I find that KDE offers me exactly that, and given that today's 64-bit
hardware is hardly sold with only 256 MiB of RAM anymore, I really don't
give a hoot about KDE's memory footprint. I have 4 GiB in this machine,
and it's not swapping. Okay, granted, I decreased the swappiness from
its default value, but even before I started doing that, it would only
rarely swap, and that was usually only after I had been moving very big
files (or very large amounts of files) around, and then still it would
only swap by a few hundred KiB.
I think you will find that the people who claim that KDE performs
fellatios are also the very same people who make the same claim about
anything that does not agree with their very narrow and prejudiced
opinions, whether they be about politics, society, economics, military,
religious, sports, automotive products, firearms or whatever. The
opinion of such people is therefore best ignored, since it is only
/their/ subjective (and poorly informed) opinion and it has no basis in
factual reality.
KDE's popularity /has/ taken a great hit when KDE 4 was pushed
prematurely, and it was very unfortunate that this also coincided with
Ubuntu's choice for making GNOME the default - and they have in the
meantime moved on to Unity, which is a shell around GNOME 3 - but there
/are/ still many distributions which supply KDE as their default desktop
environment, and Ubuntu's Unity - which was developed for netbooks and
tablets - has also been driving people away unto other desktop
environments again, including KDE.
Many don't like the semantic desktop paradigm which is embedded in KDE,
but this semantic desktop is not a KDE-specific matter. In fact, it
comes from RedHat, via their freedesktop.org propaganda machine, and
most of the popular desktop environments have in the meantime already
adopted it as a desktop paradigm, including GNOME and Unity.
I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but RedHat *is* trying
very hard to monopolize the direction of GNU/Linux evolution these days.
systemd is one of those things - yes, even the mighty Debian has now
fallen, and Ubuntu is set to follow (as per Shuttleworth's decision and
announcement) - naturally, Mint, being a derivative of Ubuntu, will
follow suit as well - and then there's the whole PulseAudio stuff, the
GDM/GNOME/udev/systemd integration, dbus, and soon the "/usr merge",
which several distributions have already adopted.
The good thing about Free/Libre & Open Source Software is that there is
always choice, and the option to fork projects which are deemed to be
evolving in the wrong direction. We've seen what happened when Oracle
absorbed Sun Microsystems. Oracle nuked OpenSolaris, so the developers
forked the project into OpenIndiana. It was suspected that OpenOffice
would be nuked as well, so LibreOffice was created - and Oracle didn't
end up nuking OpenOffice after all, but that was probably just to spite
the LibreOffice developers. There were concerns with regard to MySQL,
and so MariaDB was created (by the original MySQL developer).
GNOME 3 became an abomination - Linus Torvalds expressed his personal
dislike for GNOME 3 in a rather vocal manner - so GNOME 2 was forked by
the Mint developers into what is now MATE, and Cinnamon was developed by
those same Mint developers as a GNOME 2-like shell around GNOME 3. The
LXDE developers did not like the way GTK 3 was evolving, so they decided
to go with Qt instead, and Mark Shuttleworth has already announced that
the future version of Unity will be based upon Qt as well, but this
transition is probably delayed until Canonical's Mir display server is
ready for mainstream use - which it isn't yet at this point in time.
Either way, choice, configurability and customizability are the tenets
of the UNIX philosophy - well, portability also belongs in there,
actually - and in my opinion, KDE embodies all of that. Let those who
hate it use something else - that choice *is* there, at least - but I
think you'll be hard-pressed to find any contemporary desktop
environment that you can tweak to your hearts content very easily
without having to edit any text files. E-17 and the upcoming E-18,
maybe. But there won't be too many others.
Time to get off my beer case again. ;-)
P.S.: I also like KDE's Yakuake. It's a drop-down terminal emulator
à la Konsole, which drops down from the top of the screen when
pressing F12 (or another chosen shortcut key). It supports
multiple sessions via tabs and gets out of your way as soon as
you want it to.
--
= Aragorn =
http://www.linuxcounter.net - registrant #223157
alt.os.linux.slackware...
> [...] I've tried and like XFCE and even like Enlightenment (I even
> tried the very latest E18). Unfortunately *for me* they're just a
> little too unwieldy and not quite as easy to use, and yes I gave them
> each almost a week of use to try and see if I could get used to the
> idiosyncracies of them, but it just couldn't quite do it for me. I
> don't go around telling the world that they both "suck dick", though I
> could by the logic many here seem to go by. [...]
> little too unwieldy and not quite as easy to use, and yes I gave them
> each almost a week of use to try and see if I could get used to the
> idiosyncracies of them, but it just couldn't quite do it for me. I
> don't go around telling the world that they both "suck dick", though I
The thing is that KDE comes set up *out-of-the-box* with a roughly
Windows-like appearance, because that's what the developers and package
maintainers suspect that most people coming from the Windows world will
want to have on their screen.
Now, with that in mind, the name "KDE" gets equated with "Windows" by
elitists who feel that they have to be "special" in some way by choosing
something "that doesn't look like Windows". This is especially true
among those particular elitists who have been born with both prejudice
and disdain embedded into their genes.
Like you, I have tried various desktop environments and standalone
window managers over the years, and although I now use Enlightenment
(DR16) on my very old and under-spec'ed laptop (whenever I do need a GUI
on that), I have also been using KDE ever since my very first GNU/Linux
installation, back in 1999. And it is to date still the most easily
configurable and most customizable of all desktop environments I've seen
so far, not to mention - albeit that this *is* subjective - that I also
find it the most aesthetically pleasing one, courtesy of it being built
on the Qt widget sets.
KDE 4 was pushed way too soon by the distro packagers. Some - e.g.
Gentoo - even went so far as to deliberately break KDE 3 "because it was
no longer in active development" in order to push the users onto KDE 4,
unless they wanted to go with any of the other desktop environments or
window managers. I myself stuck with KDE 3 for as long as I could,
because I wanted to await the stage of KDE 4's development where it
became just as usable as the KDE 3.5.10 version I myself was using.
At present, I am using KDE 4.6.5 - that's already old, by technology's
standards - and although it does have a few small bugs, it /is/ now
indeed *very usable.* Furthermore, even though it came set up with
quite an unpleasing appearance (in my personal taste), I have managed to
tweak and tune it to be *exactly what I want* in a desktop environment
that I have to work with.
I've done that by, among other things, installing the Bespin theme, and
the included X-Bar widget, which adds a global menu to a panel - this
requires that you create an extra panel at the top, of course. Some of
the stuff from the lower panel was relocated to the top panel, such as
the main KDE menu icon, the clock, a bookmarks icon, the System Settings
icon and a window list icon. The bottom panel has a screenshot icon, a
virtual desktop pager (with 12 virtual desktops), the task manager, a
few icons for stuff that I need to bring up fast and more than once at
the same time - e.g. Firefox, Konqueror, Dolphin and KWrite - plus the
system tray, which I've customized to always show certain icons (even
when they were not there by default) and to permanently hide certain
other icons, and then finally there is also a CPU and memory load widget
which, when clicked, brings up the KDE System Monitor, and lastly, a
calculator widget which pops up from the panel but stays attached to it.
I've also customized the colors, font sizes, the way the running tasks
are shown in the task manager, the window borders (with a custom button
arrangement) and I use a single mouse click for everything - which is
definitely not Windows-like.
Having some very dark themed graphical interface with high contrast
yellow, red or fluorescent green text and over-the-top window borders
with a goth theme and some cyberpunk wallpaper may look cool in movies
about "l33t /-/4c|{3rz" - you might want to throw in Angelina Jolie for
increased viewer ratings - or maybe it'll give you extra bragging rights
at a LAN party or a gaming fest - you /do/ of course have windows and
many differently colored fluorescent lights in your computer housing,
right? - but for me, GNU/Linux is the only operating system I'm using on
my computers, and I use my computers for doing "productive stuff".
They're not bragging or gaming machines, and I'm not auditioning my
machines for any Hollywood productions either. And that means that the
GUI I use on my machines must be both usable/functional to me /and/ look
aesthetic (in my taste) at the same time.
I find that KDE offers me exactly that, and given that today's 64-bit
hardware is hardly sold with only 256 MiB of RAM anymore, I really don't
give a hoot about KDE's memory footprint. I have 4 GiB in this machine,
and it's not swapping. Okay, granted, I decreased the swappiness from
its default value, but even before I started doing that, it would only
rarely swap, and that was usually only after I had been moving very big
files (or very large amounts of files) around, and then still it would
only swap by a few hundred KiB.
I think you will find that the people who claim that KDE performs
fellatios are also the very same people who make the same claim about
anything that does not agree with their very narrow and prejudiced
opinions, whether they be about politics, society, economics, military,
religious, sports, automotive products, firearms or whatever. The
opinion of such people is therefore best ignored, since it is only
/their/ subjective (and poorly informed) opinion and it has no basis in
factual reality.
KDE's popularity /has/ taken a great hit when KDE 4 was pushed
prematurely, and it was very unfortunate that this also coincided with
Ubuntu's choice for making GNOME the default - and they have in the
meantime moved on to Unity, which is a shell around GNOME 3 - but there
/are/ still many distributions which supply KDE as their default desktop
environment, and Ubuntu's Unity - which was developed for netbooks and
tablets - has also been driving people away unto other desktop
environments again, including KDE.
Many don't like the semantic desktop paradigm which is embedded in KDE,
but this semantic desktop is not a KDE-specific matter. In fact, it
comes from RedHat, via their freedesktop.org propaganda machine, and
most of the popular desktop environments have in the meantime already
adopted it as a desktop paradigm, including GNOME and Unity.
I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but RedHat *is* trying
very hard to monopolize the direction of GNU/Linux evolution these days.
systemd is one of those things - yes, even the mighty Debian has now
fallen, and Ubuntu is set to follow (as per Shuttleworth's decision and
announcement) - naturally, Mint, being a derivative of Ubuntu, will
follow suit as well - and then there's the whole PulseAudio stuff, the
GDM/GNOME/udev/systemd integration, dbus, and soon the "/usr merge",
which several distributions have already adopted.
The good thing about Free/Libre & Open Source Software is that there is
always choice, and the option to fork projects which are deemed to be
evolving in the wrong direction. We've seen what happened when Oracle
absorbed Sun Microsystems. Oracle nuked OpenSolaris, so the developers
forked the project into OpenIndiana. It was suspected that OpenOffice
would be nuked as well, so LibreOffice was created - and Oracle didn't
end up nuking OpenOffice after all, but that was probably just to spite
the LibreOffice developers. There were concerns with regard to MySQL,
and so MariaDB was created (by the original MySQL developer).
GNOME 3 became an abomination - Linus Torvalds expressed his personal
dislike for GNOME 3 in a rather vocal manner - so GNOME 2 was forked by
the Mint developers into what is now MATE, and Cinnamon was developed by
those same Mint developers as a GNOME 2-like shell around GNOME 3. The
LXDE developers did not like the way GTK 3 was evolving, so they decided
to go with Qt instead, and Mark Shuttleworth has already announced that
the future version of Unity will be based upon Qt as well, but this
transition is probably delayed until Canonical's Mir display server is
ready for mainstream use - which it isn't yet at this point in time.
Either way, choice, configurability and customizability are the tenets
of the UNIX philosophy - well, portability also belongs in there,
actually - and in my opinion, KDE embodies all of that. Let those who
hate it use something else - that choice *is* there, at least - but I
think you'll be hard-pressed to find any contemporary desktop
environment that you can tweak to your hearts content very easily
without having to edit any text files. E-17 and the upcoming E-18,
maybe. But there won't be too many others.
Time to get off my beer case again. ;-)
P.S.: I also like KDE's Yakuake. It's a drop-down terminal emulator
à la Konsole, which drops down from the top of the screen when
pressing F12 (or another chosen shortcut key). It supports
multiple sessions via tabs and gets out of your way as soon as
you want it to.
--
= Aragorn =
http://www.linuxcounter.net - registrant #223157
Michael Black
Mar 3, 2014, 12:47:14 AM3/3/14
to
On Sun, 2 Mar 2014, Aragorn wrote:
> On Sunday 02 March 2014 15:19, Tralfaz conveyed the following to
> alt.os.linux.slackware...
>
>> [...] I've tried and like XFCE and even like Enlightenment (I even
>> tried the very latest E18). Unfortunately *for me* they're just a
>> little too unwieldy and not quite as easy to use, and yes I gave them
>> each almost a week of use to try and see if I could get used to the
>> idiosyncracies of them, but it just couldn't quite do it for me. I
>> don't go around telling the world that they both "suck dick", though I
>> could by the logic many here seem to go by. [...]
>
> The thing is that KDE comes set up *out-of-the-box* with a roughly
> Windows-like appearance, because that's what the developers and package
> maintainers suspect that most people coming from the Windows world will
> want to have on their screen.
>
> Now, with that in mind, the name "KDE" gets equated with "Windows" by
> elitists who feel that they have to be "special" in some way by choosing
> something "that doesn't look like Windows". This is especially true
> among those particular elitists who have been born with both prejudice
> and disdain embedded into their genes.
>
Is that why I never had a problem with it? I've barely used Windows, so
> On Sunday 02 March 2014 15:19, Tralfaz conveyed the following to
> alt.os.linux.slackware...
>
>> [...] I've tried and like XFCE and even like Enlightenment (I even
>> tried the very latest E18). Unfortunately *for me* they're just a
>> little too unwieldy and not quite as easy to use, and yes I gave them
>> each almost a week of use to try and see if I could get used to the
>> idiosyncracies of them, but it just couldn't quite do it for me. I
>> don't go around telling the world that they both "suck dick", though I
>> could by the logic many here seem to go by. [...]
>
> The thing is that KDE comes set up *out-of-the-box* with a roughly
> Windows-like appearance, because that's what the developers and package
> maintainers suspect that most people coming from the Windows world will
> want to have on their screen.
>
> Now, with that in mind, the name "KDE" gets equated with "Windows" by
> elitists who feel that they have to be "special" in some way by choosing
> something "that doesn't look like Windows". This is especially true
> among those particular elitists who have been born with both prejudice
> and disdain embedded into their genes.
>
it's never been a standard to compare things with.
I never had a problem with KDE until I installed 14.0. I was slow to
upgrade so maybe the issue came with an earlier release of Slackware. But
I installed on a 3GHz computer (compared to the previous 1GHz) that had
2gigs of ram (compared to 512megs) and I found it sluggish. Maybe it was
something that could be turned off, but I found it took as long to start
up as it had taken on the slower computer with an earlier version of KDE.
And something was using more RAM, despite having more RAM more was getting
used (and not just used as buffer) and it rose up the longer KDE ran. I
had had no problem with KDE back with a 200MHz Pentium with 32megs of RAM,
but something about the arrangement in 14.0 was slowing it down.
So I moved to xfce4. I miss the familiarity of KDE, but functionally I
haven't found anything missing. It's just an annoying change.
Michael
Henrik Carlqvist
Mar 3, 2014, 2:50:16 AM3/3/14
to
On Sun, 02 Mar 2014 14:19:05 +0000, Tralfaz wrote:
> Again, how can you say this and make it sound like it's happening to
> everyone else also.
I don't, but having seen 3 different KDE bugs in only a week during my
> Again, how can you say this and make it sound like it's happening to
> everyone else also.
tests I fear that I will get a lot of problems if I deploy such a system
to a lot of users.
> It isn't.
Maybe it isn't for most users. However, at least one of the bugs I was
bitten by that week have been seen by others:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194196
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=184062
Obviously that bug has been i KDE since year 2009 and it is still there.
However, Slackware 13.1 from 2010 does not behave like that.
> I've tried and like XFCE and even like Enlightenment (I even tried the
> very latest E18). Unfortunately *for me* they're just a little too
> unwieldy and not quite as easy to use, and yes I gave them each almost
> a week of use to try and see if I could get used to the idiosyncracies
> of them, but it just couldn't quite do it for me.
as in KDE. Still, my recomendation for my users will be XFCE over KDE and
I will warn my users of KDE sometimes hanging when adding icons to the
panel.
> I don't go around telling the world that they both "suck dick", though I
> could by the logic many here seem to go by.
KDE over XFCE. All I say is that in Slackware 14.1 I cannot recommend any
of my users to use KDE. I started this thread to find out which window
managers others prefer. I did not at first intend to give any motivations
to why I would switch from KDE.
During my evaluations of Slackware 14.1 I have also seen other oddities
like:
Unable to umount NFS when connection to server lost (solution posted in
this group)
Automount unable to umount when stale NFS handle (not yet fully
investigated)
Screen resolution connected to user account rather than different
machines having different monitors (not yet fully investigated)
>> Last week I found two different ways for plasma-desktop to hang to an
>> unusable state. When I got back to work on monday, the panel was in a
>> somewhat more useful state, but buggy in a way I had never seen the KDE
>> panel to bug out before.
>
> So what did you do to fix it?
> Did it take you so long that you would have been better to simply
> reinstall 14.1? Be honest about it.
But if you really want to discuss KDE solutions, lets discuss the lost
NFS server KDE panel bug:
Killing X with ctrl-alt-backspace and logging in to KDE again does not
help, the panel will be hung again.
Rebooting will help if the NFS server is not mounted again, but stock
Slackware 14.1 will hang at the shutdown process being unable to umount
the NFS directory. I pointed to a kernel patch which fixes this, if you
don't apply that patch a hard reboot with the power button or pulling the
power cord is your only option.
I also googled to find that this was a bug well known to the KDE
community and that the bug still has not been fixed even though it was
first reported 2009.
So yes, I did spend some time trying to fix this without abandoning KDE.
> This sounds like a video/video card issue. If you're using ATI, I have
> to say that the two times I tried ATI cards with my linux (once with
> SuSE 9.3 IIRR, and once with 11.3)
remember right I was using the nouveau driver then, but after having seen
other problems with nouveau I have since switched to the evil binary
driver. One thing I miss since switching to the binary driver is lmsensor
support for temperatures and fan speeds on the graphics card.
> Either way, it doesn't sound like *just* a KDE problem...it *could*
> possibly be, but I seriously doubt it.
graphics driver. But it was only the panel which showed such weirdness.
> If you're going to take the responsibility of being in charge of 50
> other peoples' systems, you need to not complain about what *might*
> happen.
also know that we get the source for the software and that any problems
can be fixed. However, the easiest route for me to fix the problems is to
avoid the problematic software when there is a choice.
> I'd sure not keep a admin who complained about 'maybe's' and 'could
> be's' and 'might's' unless it was proven that it *will* happen no
> matter what system and who uses it or how it was used, or if I wasn't
> told that it was a 'fixable' situation that took all of an hour or two.
before deploying it to a lot of users. After some testing you will find
things that need fixing or you might even come to the decision not to
deploy the system at all. Unfortunately, even though you have tested it
yourself, other users will allways find other ways to stumble upon new
bugs. But at least you have been able to catch some of them.
> I have to grudgingly admit that it's improving and
> quite useable for me at least.
KDE has many advantages and I don't think you should drop it only because
I have found some quirks which pops up at my usage.
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