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

[Julian Yap]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Peter Besenbruch <peter at besenbruch.info> wrote:
> 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.

When KDE made the jump from 3 to 4 it annoyed me because I used
Konsole (which was awesome) as my primary terminal which was then
replaced by a crappy bare bones KDE 4 Konsole...  I eventually
switched to just running Gnome terminal.

I still use desktop Linux at work but Gnome 3 in fallback mode.  I
have a laptop too that I installed with XFCE and that works great.

The problem is that larger open source projects such as Gnome and KDE
don't have the resources to put out a new major release of their
desktop early on.  So they need to just release it and improve it over
time.  In the meanwhile users suffer and the whole usage is different.

... Except I know I'm not alone but my primary laptop is now a MacBook
Air 13".  The main problem is that Linux laptops suck with
suspend/resume/hibernate and battery life.  In the end it just feels
so much better to throw the lid of the laptop down and lift it up
without hoping things don't go bad.  And in the end, I'm still just
using the terminal mostly and Linux has won the server battle.

- Julian