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Re: [LUG] Desktop trauma

 

On Sun, 13 Nov 2011, George Parker wrote:

2. If you are the masochistic type (most of the people on this LUG) what the hell do you run?

I don't consider myself particularly masochistic, but I run Debian stable. (Squeeze) However I run it currently with xfce4 (until earlier this year, I'd run it with fvwm, and had been using fvwm since about 1994). I manually installed Firefox 4 to use rather than Iceweasel (based on ff3.5) which has subsequently upgraded itself to 8 now. I've also tweaked my xfce4 install to make it more the way I want it (I do not use the "desktop metaphor" for example, and value vertical space, so the bar thing is on the right - I really have no use for 95% of it's reported functionality).

Sadly, editing the menus under xfce4 under Debian Squeeze is a bloody nightmare, so I after managing to add 2 or 3 new entries to it, I abandoned it. No real matter, I type 95% of stuff I want into an xterm, but under fvwm, it was handy to use a menu to pop up an xterm ssh'd into one of the dozens of systems I look after, now I just (shock horror) type the server name into an xterm and there it is.

Actually, there is one masochistic thing I do and that's compile my own kernels completely customised to the underlying hardware. That's an efficiency thing for me and occasionally to cover some hardware not supported in Debians stock kernel. It's not needed and I've never bothered with it for the Debian desktop systems I've built for my wife and others.

I don't use "file managers" for several reasons - mostly because I find them slow to actually find files I'm after - also I don't know my alphabet, so if looking for a file that starts with the letter "P" for example, I've got to work my way down the list to find out where it is. Knowing that P is before Q and after O doesn't come naturally to me. (Actually, I know that Q is after P, but I just had to go through the alphabet to work out that O is before it - something to do with dyslexia, I gather)

I also detest colour syntax highlighting, so putting things in colour doesn't work for me (dyslexia again) and I need high-contrast colour system. Whoever bloated 'ls' with colours need stringing up by their goolies IMO.

Have a look at http://unicorn.drogon.net/lug-screen.png to see what my rather minimal desktop looks like. The top of the bar on the right is a 3x3 virtual window switcher (you can just about make out FireFox in the 2nd window, more Xterms on the far-right) There is an ionised xterm, then a silly yellow-notes application I never use, the volume control I use sometimes, then some silly stats and 'transmission' is running at the bottom.

I used gimp to grab the image, then opened an xterm to scp the file to the web server and delete it from my home directory.

My work is mostly done in Xterms - remote access to servers, editing, compiling, etc. I rarely play games, but do play the odd video (launch xterm, type cd path/to/videos ; vlc filename.avi, or similar) copy files (launch xterm, type cp, rsync, etc. commands)

Things that annoy me are programs that pop up a file-browser to save a file - then list all the existing files in the current directory. I have 1630 files in my home directory right now and that takes time for a bloated GUI program to list, sort, display, etc.

(filecount - open xterm, ls | wc -l, close xterm)

30 years ago I was using some of the early "glass teletypes" to do stuff on unix, (adm3, tektronix, etc.) 20 or so years ago I had the 'screen' program for the times I found myself on a vt100 rather than a Sun Workstation, now I have 9 virtual screens with as many Xterms as I like....

You know, I'm not really sure some would call that progress...

As I said, here we go again.

Maybe work out what you actually want or need to do?

Gordon

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