[LUAU] A reflection on the state of the Linux desktop

[Peter Besenbruch]

On Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:17:03 -1000
Jeff Mings <jeffm at lava.net> wrote:

> Gnome 3 is not really ready for prime time.
> 
> If you're using Ubuntu 12.04 and don't like Unity, go straight to Mate
> Desktop and don't waste your time playing with the others.

Thanks for your impressions of Unity and Gnome. I fear Gnome 3 will make Gnome
a mere shadow of its former self. The Gnome team's lack of responsiveness
reminds me of the XFree86 crew, and Oracle. Here's hoping Mate stays viable.

My own path over the years has been different. I was always partial to KDE. I
was smart enough to avoid the earliest versions of KDE 4, making the jump to
4.3. I noticed several things: There was less functionality than 3.5 (mostly
rectified now). The memory footprint was larger. You could run KDE with 256
meg. of RAM. Now you really need 512. There was lots of stuff running in the
background, and things got worse if you ran KDE-PIM.

Eventuallly, I found substitutes for the KDE apps I ran. I use the version 3.5
version of KDEaddressbook from Trinity. I switched from Kmail to Claws. I do my
calendar stuff with an on-line app that comes with the domain I use, instead of
Korganizer.

With most of the KDE apps gone, KDE went too. Eventually I settled on XFCE 4.8.
I use it on Ubuntu Lucid and Debian Squeeze. With Squeeze, it uses less than 90
meg. on a fresh boot to desktop. It's very flexible, and above all, stable.

I also use Remmina to connect to a Vino server, both running under XFCE. Hey,
they work.