What does your desktop look like?

[dedanna1029]

But I will say, I'm very jealous of someone at the Mageia forum with this desktop. WAAAAAAAAANNNT.

[dedanna1029]

IceWM.

RAWKS!

Screenie maybe tomorrow (if I can figure how to dress up a couple things like mouse cursor and wallpaper).

Here's the arse-kicker. My CPU load has maintained not over 1.26 since I kicked in IceWM, RAM is like so minimal it's sick. I love it. You guys kan haz yer KDEs, yer Gnomes, yer XFCEs, and all yer resource-hogging stuff. I'm gonna be flying with this, and leaving you all behind in the dust. That 1.26 CPU load, btw, is with FF running.

[dedanna1029]

IceWM is going to have to wait until I can figure out a couple things on it, and deal with the fact that Mageia 3, in its devs' infinite wisdom (*snark) doesn't even have idesk or IcePrefs in the repos. This is becoming increasingly frustrating with Linux. Gnome is not an option any more. As for your beloved KDE, it would be nice if plasma-desktop didn't crash at the sight of transferring a file (at a whopping 1.1MB/s, mind you, and even that it does at 100% CPU), if the cursor wouldn't stay busy for what seems like endless minutes just hovering over a file in Dolphin or Konqueror (and that's before I can even select the damn file!), and not being able to get some damn REAL properties on multimedia files, such as year, album, artist, etc., if it didn't crash on sight of extracting a file, if it didn't go to 100% CPU while cron's running, if it didn't take literally five minutes to load in, I'D BE MILDLY HAPPY. As it is, it makes me want to tear my computer a new arsehole and chuck it out the window, and quit computing.

ARGH! Screw this! I WANT A REAL DESKTOP!!! We used to be able to run Linux on 1GB of RAM, and that was one of its selling points, was that it would run on older hardware! As it is now, there is no way in hell it will!

I ONLY HAVE A 2-YR-OLD NETBOOK, PEOPLE!!! And YOU deny that Linux is becoming another WINDOWS. That's a windows ploy!

[viking60]

Try Manjaro
It is 100 % Arch compatible with GUI installer and fast with low mem use.

I use Openbox (self made) but you can download the Manjaro openbox edition if you like or use IceWM...
Mageia is for those who want a KDE or Gnome it aims to be beginner friendly and has KDE as a default. If you do not like that - why pick that distro?

[dedanna1029]

Why pick any of them at all? They are all going to be either Gnome or KDE-centric, which both suck balls, so who cares anyway.

Even the KDE Netbook "edition" sucks. It's horridly inconvenient and definitely not user-friendly. Hell, it takes three hours just to figure out in it that you have to click that something-or-other at the upper right to get to the proggie(s) you have open. It's nothing but crapped-on plasma-desktop anyway.

Openbox, yeah, I tried it on Mageia 2 - it crashed soon as I had it right where I wanted it (yes, I used what you had here), and tried it again. It did the same thing. That was the end of that. I don't have time (seriously) to go through all that setup for nothing, and refuse to do it again. In fact, I don't think I should have to. We have devs for Linux that should be hung by their balls - and I won't say anything different, nor will I contribute anything to Linux, until they get heading in the right direction again. They all need to QUIT fixing what ain't f*ckin' broke.

What would I have done at the time? LEFT GNOME 2.32 ALONE EXCEPT FOR SECURITY UPDATES, AND LEFT KDE 3.5 ALONE EXCEPT FOR SECURITY UPDATES.

Seriously, I need a better OS all 'round.

[viking60]

Sure - You liked Gnome 2 - we get that
But why criticize Linux for that?

You have slax and puppy that are so light that they will even run on my wrist watch. So I do not see the justification for your crusade against Linux.

I do not have any trouble with Linux at all - It is the best OS in existence and way better than iOS and Windows.

Sure I did not like the Gnome 3 nanny style - so I dropped it! That is a good thing:

If nobody wants to use it, then it will die and sooner or later the devs will get tired of making stuff for their own egos that nobody wants to use.

They need the admiration and there will be precious little of that if nobody uses their stuff.

I might give Gnome 3 a spin again at some later point just to see if it has improved - nothing is written in stone.

I think KDE is good but there are a lot of options that I don't use - and I have not had any trouble with KDE in a long time.

Openbox is my current choice - and the flexibility of Linux gives me the opportunity to change my mind regarding that - at any given time.

It may take some tweaking but once that is finished; they all run nicely here.

[dedanna1029]

Puppy doesn't work on this thing, been there tried that.
Mint doesn't work on this thing, and I'm actually glad for that.
Ubuntu I want nothing to do with.
Arch & Manjaro, well, they best work extremely well on this thing (we're talking a 1.66GHz processor, with 1GB RAM), and I better not have a helluva time installing them. No time for that. Mom's very demanding.
I've tried I don't know how many distros on this thing it makes me sick.

Why did I choose Mageia? At least it would install!!! Their problem is they're short on packages for alternate desktops. I guess they think everyone's on Peta-byte processors and 15 trillion tons of RAM. All the distros seem to think so these days, so hey! Let's shove BLOATWARE into everything, and make the dumbed-down of the populous buy it (meaning "go for it with ra-ra!")!

I'm sorry, I'm tired of the fanboism of this crap. All I care to have is something that works, without having to hassle every single end of it. End of story. Linux used to do that. It doesn't any more. We now have to f*ck with it and f*ck with it and f*ck with it, and hope it works.

I do NOT buy that, and do you really think that if we didn't have Linux devs screwing with this that and the other, that we'd have Gnome and KDE, the majority of which now is bloated crapware that no one wants??? Do you think we'd have this??? Maybe *someday* they'll get back to writing real code and making real desktops that anyone can run like they used to, and STOP slapping in sloppy resource-hogging social crap (not to mention that we have to have a "plasma" for everything, or an "extension" for everything, that should be included anyway).

[dedanna1029]

In a system search as su - for "icewm", I've found a folder that came up in the process, /usr/share/X11/icewm/. In that folder is a file called "preferences"... see where I'm going with this? Lucky find.
The file is for everything for icewm, and begins:

Code: Select all

# preferences(1.3.7) - generated by genpref

# This file should be copied to /etc/icewm/ or $HOME/.icewm/ directory
# NOTE: --->All settings are commented out by default<---, be sure to
#       uncomment them if you change them!

Code: Select all

.:[ dedanna@dedanna.rockz.net : 21:38:09 : ~ ]:.
:) ls /usr/share/X11/icewm/
icons/  keys  ledclock/  mailbox/  menu  preferences  taskbar/  themes/  toolbar  winoptions
.:[ dedanna@dedanna.rockz.net : 21:38:13 : ~ ]:.

I don't know about you, but I think I best copy this file to $HOME/.icewm and do some editing.

I've also found in $HOME/.icewm, a file called "menu" that's appeared... got it edited today so that the kicker is the way I want it, with the programs I use included and showing.

Y'know, this could work out if I can get time to get these things edited up. So far though, it seems more work than Openbox. I'm still using icewm, but have to get down to how to get programs to autostart. I'll see if that's in the preferences file, or where it could be. As it is now, I just start these things myself when I login - although gnote starts automatically.

[viking60]

Copying it to home is definitely the best strategy.
That way you can simply start all over again if you FUBAR.
ICEWM and Openbox are minimalistic - yet functional.
I have noticed that distros like Mageia and Mandriva do not have all the files and goodies that they need - so I had to fetch the rpms elsewhere.

This is only natural since they are in the "works out of the box for newbies" market.
That is where they have to focus.

If you want Icewm or plain openbox; pick Manjaro or Arch.

I can also recommend Xfce with the lxdm login manager -it is fast and light.

Video here:

[dedanna1029]

Nice. Is the lxdm login manager configurable appearance-wise, and does it have functions like the good old gdm login used to have (it used to be in Gnome 2 we could edit the login manager right there from the login manager)? I'm still waiting for some things to appear in XFCE before I go it, that I used in Gnome.

Editing the menu file didn't work out - it's buggy as all get-out, doesn't save correctly, and so one ends up with a totally screwed menu. Tried a "startup" file in ~/.icewm - it made it load really strangely, with freezes (and these are just the same things I've had before in Gnome and KDE; startguake.sh, QasMixer, Qlipper, and one other thing), so have to go back to the drawing board on that too.
It could have been because I found a very old version of icecc (IceWM Control Panel), and it may be interfering with what I'm doing manually. I'm going to try uninstalling it and see what happens then.

I also read that for the menu (and I can't remember specifics now), it needs each entry in twice in the file for some reason. Left it with the two, and now the two show up.

Back to the drawing board...

[viking60]

Yes it is very configurable and works all over the place.
Manjaro has a new login manager - mdm - with html5 animations. It is great and talk about animated eye-candy:

Video coming up....

It is in a VB but you get the idea....

[dedanna1029]

I can also recommend Xfce with the lxdm login manager -it is fast and light.

Video here:

Yeah, very nice!...

Y'know, I finally had a bit to play with this thing, and installed the rest of the XFCE "stuff" to see if it had matured any since I last used it; if the features I want are there, and guess what. I'm totally completely shocked at how much it's grown up. There's a tad of a lag, but it's the only desktop so far on Mageia at least, that the netbook can handle the compositing on. I'm also having a blast putting up a fairly cool gnome-ish look to it.

Just two questions. The last time I used it, we had to go about a sort of "special" way of switching the panels top/bottom. I'm trying to remember how that was. Was that in Settings-->Settings Manager-->Panel-->Change the drop-down where it has it for "Panel 1", "Panel 2", etc.? Think I'll try that - I seem to remember something about that.

I'm also wondering if compiz can be used for the compositing manager on it, rather than the XFCE one (what is that one, anyway)? I'd like to see if I can get Emerald going again on this thing, and I need compiz for that. If it can be, how do I replace the XFCE one?

So far, here's what I've got. Quiet-purple style, transparency going, shadow going, and oh boy, do I love that window roll-up feature! I also love that it uses xscreensaver for the screensaver. I've done a bit more tweaking since I took these today, more screenies up and coming when I can get a bit again to play with this stuff.



I do think however, that I'm going to get the new Mageia 3 dvd, install 64-bit (formatting / only), and then do the compiz if it can be done on this.

FINALLY, something I can UUUUUUUUSSSE!!! This is cool! Thank you (and jkerr too as he'd mentioned he uses it as well)!