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Re: [LUG] More on my upgrade ..

 

On Tue, 7 Jun 2011, Simon Waters wrote:

Gordon Henderson wrote:

The thing I've always found frustrating with modern window (desktop)
environments is that they take up screen real-estate and applications are
then designed (by default) to open full-screen.

I just auto-hide the GNOME bars... no real estate vanishes - can't afford
it all my monitors are still 1024 x 768

I tried that back when I had to use a Win box for something. I just didn't get on with it. Things that move/slide on mouse overs aren't my cup of tea.. (and I hate all those auto-pop-ups on web pages, but I've not installed noscript yet. Hm.)

Since all my work involves typing into Xterms, I like to have a few open
next to each other, and maybe a small window of some otehr application,
etc. so I can quickly switch between then. I've no need (nor use) for a
desktop with files, nor a "file manger"

I rarely use either, sometimes when playing with images or video the GNOME
file manager is a handy preview. I need to persuade it that "delete" is
"delete" when used on removal USB storage, not rename it all
.Trash{mumble}, I dare say there is a place to do this if only I'd looked.

That's the issue - looking for it... Takes time to learn something new and we (well me!) gets set in our old ways!

At work I have KDE (all autohiding), and I kind of like the KDE Konsole as
a terminal (better than Xterm) but that is probably just being use to it.
But KDE really is hideous in Squeeze, it'll try and index everything in
MySQL or some such by default, which I'm sure is helpful to someone.

Eek! Isn't that one of the many things that slows up windoze ... Don't people learn?

In the 3 PCs I built recently, I had them run gnome with all the defaults... Something is polling the disks every 2 seconds. What? The disks will never spin down with all that going on. It's little stuff like that which really irritates me. People don't think about their actions... Database indexing files - well... Why?

I know - so file browsers can display them quickly and 'find' can work fast - but in these days with ext3+dir_index it's really not slow at all to read a directory - stat (to get file sizes, dates, etc.) is still slow though, but is it really needed all the time? (firefox annoys me when it wants to upload a file - it gets a list of all he files in my home directory, stats them all, then puts them in an alphabetically indexed box - I have 1800 files in my home directory and I can type the filename in faster than it can do that )-:

And have we all forgotten the locate command? Maybe not enough people leave their PCs on overnight for it to work though...


(And then there's my whinge about me not being able to spot files alphabetically - fortunately I can type in the filename, but only after it takes its time to display them all - and applications not using my X defaults to specify default background and text colours - xterm under xfce4 comes up as white text on a pale yellow background rather than black text on the pale yellow background)

So do I waste a day getting to grips with xfce4/gnome, or just soldier
on...

I'd stick GNOME in and see if it helps sort things for productivity, then
go back to fvwm if/when you have time to sort it out. GNOME really
shouldn't take much learning, it is fairly painless and bland. You might
even find you can persuade it to fix things, and tell you what it did. I
find that more and more.....

I've loaded up xfce4 and can now login to each environment (thanks to gdm) Things that I like doing in fvwm - vertically maximise a window at the touch of a button (and horizontally) and bring them back to their original sizes. I know I can do that in xfce, so probably can in gnome too. I like the way focus stays in a window with my fvwm setup - even when I move the mouse out. I like that focus goes into a window automatically when I move the mouse over it - and that window automatically raises to the top. I like that I can switch virtual desktops by moving the mouse, or by using the keyboard (alt+arrow keys) I'm sure these can all be mapped into gnome/xfce.

I did get xfce to have no icons on the desktop though, so that's a start!

But for some reason it seems to not have all my firefox bookmarks - which I can't work out at all, as I'd have thought it would have nothing to do with an application installed indepedndantly...

Ah well...

Gordon

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