[Gllug] Debian

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Thu, 2003-10-23 at 00:28, David Damerell wrote:
> On Wednesday, 22 Oct 2003, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> >When I stated using X as a desktop, the best thing about it was the
> >choice of window managers. They all offered far more control than MS
> >Windows does:-
> >1/ Window stacking order decoupled from window focus
> >2/ Sloppy focus
> >3/ Virtual desktops (arranged in an arbitrary 2d grid, with mousing
> >between them possible.
> >4/ A bare environment - it was up to me to add whatever applets I wanted
> >to the root window, showing stuff like mail, time, etc.
> >5/ Network transparency
> >Gnome and KDE work very hard to undermine all of those features,
> 
> I use bits of Gnome - the gnome-panel and a few applications. 1,2 and
> 3 never went away.

Well, it depends on what WM you plug into Gnome. As time has passed,
Gnome has emphasized a window manager with very little functionality,
and those things are not nearly as "close to the surface" as they used
to be. I'll grant you that they're still "sort of" available, but if you
just install an average gnome setup, they're not really there. Certainly
the default virtual desktop handling you get if you do the obvious
thing, and add a pager to the taskbar (4 in a row, with no mousing
between desktops) is not very good.

I imagine you can tweak it to behave better, and I'll admit that I long
ago decided I really didn't want to run a full Gnome session, so I
haven't taken any time trying to find out exactly how I could get the
full environment to work around my gripes. As such, some of my
complaints are based on what appears from the default interface to be an
implicit presumption that the average Gnome user is a Windows escapee.

>  4 is still the case, it's just that one of those
> things I add is the gnome-panel. 5 doesn't seem any less true.

It used to be easier to run "just a bit" of Gnome than it seems to be
now. Gnome applications are fine, but bits of the desktop environment
itself are mostly fairly tightly coupled, and if you choose to run only
some parts, it's usually causes problems due to built in assumptions
that certain other things will be running.

> >I went through fvwm, afterstep and WindowMaker, and finally settled on
> >Enlightenment (which I'm still using). Enlightenment used to be regarded
> >as the memory hog among window managers. It looks so modest compared to
> >Gnome that it's not even funny.
> 
> That's because GNOME IS NOT A WINDOW MANAGER.

No, it's a desktop environment. But if you just run X and a WM, then
*that* is your "desktop environment". So, although the software
architecture is different, the user experience is such that I feel it's
a fair comparison.

Mike.


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