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FizzyWidget
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 19, 2013 8:59 pm    Post subject: Suggest A DE for me Reply with quote

KDE, Gnome and even XFCE are beginning to bug the crap out of me, they all seem to have their little faults.

Latest one in XFCE is that thunar hangs when transferring files through samba.

I was thinking of trying one the *box options but seeing as I have never used them before it all seemed alien to me when adding applications to the menus

I would like something light yet functional, something that will show thumbnails of pictures and movies but take up very little resources

I did look at e17 when it was on overlay but went back to xfce, i think now is the time to make the jump :)

any and all (constructive) suggestions welcome :)
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NathanZachary
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 19, 2013 9:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I would strongly recommend Openbox, but I am a bit partial to it, for obvious reasons. If you would like to try it out, feel free to follow my guide at:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openbox.xml

Another choice which is more of a desktop-environment-esque solution is LXDE (which uses Openbox as its window manager anyway). You can read that guide here:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/lxde-howto.xml

Those would be my two recommendations, but I don't know your exact goals. I want a really light system that allows for as much customisation as possible, even if it requires a bit more work upfront.

Cheers,
Nathan Zachary
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 19, 2013 9:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the suggestion currently having a little play about with e17 seeing as it is now stable in tree, cant get PDF thumbs to appear but a minor issue atm.

will try out the links when time permits as I am working tomorrow, when i should have had the week off, but have to grab work when it is there :)
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Ion Silverbolt
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 3:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You could always just switch to a different file manager if your only problem is Thunar.

If you're looking for a DE, RazorQt might be to your liking. It's fairly new, but it's a nice Qt alternative to the heavy KDE desktop. There's a nice RazorQt thread in this forum that has some useful information on how to set up a RazorQt with a list of Qt-based apps to go with it.
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 5:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

not sure if it is only thunar, looking at a few other things it may be gvfs, but i thinkn i just needed an excuse to try different DE's :p
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lost+found
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 8:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the RazorQt suggestion. Didn't know of it.

Too sad there's so little progress on the GNUstep project, which is a pretty unique environment. I'm using it's wm Windowmaker on an old box to run a few programs.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 10:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm using LXDE/openbox on most of my computers because they are all old and resources limited : LXDE is really lightweight.
I'm quite happy with it ... but with PCManFM : I'm suffering for some crashes (random but fortunately not frequent), it doesn't display video thumbnail and frequently forget some images (but I think it's more a bug in the support library as the image viewer suffer for the same bug).
LXpanel has also a poor selection of widget.

Anyway, all in all, it suite my needs.

Now, on my new i5 / 8 Go, I switched to Xfce and very happy with it too : the only miss here is the lack of tab in Thunar but otherwise, the DE is efficient and efforts lot of customization and widget.
I'm not using samba at all, but I didn't face any problem with remote file management thru SSH.

But, IMPORTANT NOTICE, I'm using only gentoo stable release for those components and they are all quite old (i.e. : PCManFM 0.9 whereas the current version is 1.1, Thunar 1.4 vs 1.6) ...
I may switch to unstable release if I feel to limited but again, I'm happy with my current environments.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've been using Openbox for years I don't think I could ever switch from it. It's so simple and fast you can put what you want on it, feh for background, tint2 for panel, spacefm for file manager, urxvt, tmux etc are all light and fast.
The thing I like about the lighter window managers is they never seem to change in any major way, once it's set up you shouldn't have to worry about an update breaking it or needing to reconfigure anything. I'm sometimes tempted to try slightly bigger DE's for a change but even XFCE I find too bloated and nowhere near as snappy.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

thanks for the suggestion, I am testing e17 atm, and am looking at openbox next, the thing that puts me off is having to edit a load of files to get menus and such, so I may look at LXDE :)
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The menus are easy on Openbox you don't have to edit the configs manually, the Gentoo Openbox guide should tell you about menumaker to create the initial menu, then install obmenu. From then on to add / remove stuff from the right click menu just run obmenu, and click add, type the program command and name and save then it's there.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

yes I started reading it just after I posted the post above :oops: looks promising :)
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 8:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

shame that both e17 and PCManFM cant display images of videos, as they both have filesize limits :( maybe i will have better luck with spacefm
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GFCCAE6xF
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 8:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Assuming that your file manager can show thumbnails anyway, setting the file size limit to 0 will always thumbnail _everything_ in my experience.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 8:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have set it to that, same thing
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 9:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hmm, well I never got video thumbnails to work in spacefm (To be honest though, I never really tried).

For pcmanfm I had to patch libfm all the time to get thumbnails to work - I believe that is fixed now and the common patch was stitched in upstream, so you should have no issues with pcmanfm with thumbnails, I remember setting 0 size and never having any issues.

What thumbnailing utility are you trying to use? I believe I used to use tumbler.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 9:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

i have that and ffmpegthumbnailer, jpegs and stuff are okay, pdf's and videos are the problematic ones
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 23, 2013 9:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

lost+found wrote:
Thanks for the RazorQt suggestion. Didn't know of it.

Too sad there's so little progress on the GNUstep project, which is a pretty unique environment. I'm using it's wm Windowmaker on an old box to run a few programs.

GNUstep progresses, slowly but steadily :)
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SamuliSuominen
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 23, 2013 2:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ion Silverbolt wrote:
You could always just switch to a different file manager if your only problem is Thunar.


Exactly.

The file manager in Xfce has always been 100% optional part of the desktop. For a long time, like in eg. Xfce 4.2, there was only XFFM which wasn't really comprehensive file manager at all. Right now it's controlled by the USE="thunar" flag which is only enabled in the desktop profile, not on the normal one, by default -- to respect the history of keeping Xfce core minimal as possible.
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 23, 2013 3:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

FizzyWidget wrote:
i have that and ffmpegthumbnailer, jpegs and stuff are okay, pdf's and videos are the problematic ones


I suggest USE="ffmpeg -gstreamer", so:

Code:

[ebuild  N     ] xfce-extra/tumbler-0.1.29  USE="ffmpeg jpeg pdf -curl -debug -gstreamer -odf -raw" 499 kB
[ebuild  N     ]  media-video/ffmpegthumbnailer-2.0.8  USE="gtk jpeg png -gnome" 359 kB
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 23, 2013 3:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

multix wrote:
lost+found wrote:
Thanks for the RazorQt suggestion. Didn't know of it.

Too sad there's so little progress on the GNUstep project, which is a pretty unique environment. I'm using it's wm Windowmaker on an old box to run a few programs.

GNUstep progresses, slowly but steadily :)


Hehe, I know. :) I just upgraded MPDCon, which improved a lot! I have one box with Window Maker and as much GNUstep apps as possible, and one box with FVWM-Crystal.

I like GNUstep, because it's lightweight and different. Big thanks for your efforts on GNUstep!
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multix
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 23, 2013 4:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

lost+found wrote:

GNUstep progresses, slowly but steadily :)


Hehe, I know. :) I just upgraded MPDCon, which improved a lot! I have one box with Window Maker and as much GNUstep apps as possible, and one box with FVWM-Crystal.

I like GNUstep, because it's lightweight and different. Big thanks for your efforts on GNUstep![/quote]

Thanks to know we have a user. MPDCon is maintained by Sebastian. What other apps do you use?
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 23, 2013 5:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

gvfs breaks every now and then, that's always been that way :P

I rarely use GUI file managers, but when I do, I expect a number of things to just work. Otherwise, they are no use to me. For example, I need ftp and thumbnailing support. Without that, there's no gain in using a graphical file manager. The shell is way better, and if all you want is to be able to select files by name, then mc is all you need.

In other words, when I need a graphical manager, I need dolphin :lol: It's an all-or-nothing thing. I use openbox, urxvt, bluefish, filezilla, qtcreator and seamonkey, and that's about everything. But when I need a GUI file manager to, for example, manage my photos, I fire up dolphin. You don't need that much besides kdelibs and provided your USE flags are minimun. And it works just ok. You'll need to install the kioslaves and maybe dolphin-plugins, that is, unless you install the whole kdebase-runtime-meta
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 23, 2013 6:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

multix wrote:
...
Thanks to know we have a user. MPDCon is maintained by Sebastian. What other apps do you use?


I let wdm start wmaker, with GWorkspace on workspace 1 (Clip). Workspace 1, I use for these GNUstep apps, which I start from Fiend:
gnustep-apps/addresses
gnustep-apps/camera
gnustep-apps/clipbook
gnustep-apps/cynthiune
gnustep-apps/ftp
gnustep-apps/gmines
gnustep-apps/gnumail
gnustep-apps/gspdf
gnustep-apps/gworkspace
gnustep-apps/laternamagica
gnustep-apps/mpdcon (Sebastian, thank you!)
gnustep-apps/preferences
gnustep-apps/systempreferences
gnustep-apps/terminal
gnustep-apps/textedit
gnustep-apps/zipper

Now I realize, I haven't used the Tabbed Shelf for a quite a while... Hmmm.

Workspace 2, I use for non-gnustep, because I can have the wmaker menu there with one click. Most of the time I open Seamonkey there, over ssh from the other box.

If I just start GWorkspace over ssh on the other non-GNUstep box (but running under wmaker locally), it just looks and feels like a full remote desktop. You can click the other GNUstep apps to open. I think that's remarkable!


Update: Introduction to GNUstep


Last edited by lost+found on Wed Dec 25, 2013 9:50 pm; edited 1 time in total
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 23, 2013 9:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

FizzyWidget wrote:
not sure if it is only thunar, looking at a few other things it may be gvfs, but i thinkn i just needed an excuse to try different DE's :p


If it's underlying it might not be the DM/WM...?
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