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Just installed Gentoo from scratch, and switched to KDE.
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How long have you been using the same Gentoo desktop environment?
Less than a year
11%
 11%  [ 5 ]
More than a year
43%
 43%  [ 19 ]
Forever!
45%
 45%  [ 20 ]
Total Votes : 44

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MrIncredible
n00b
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Joined: 16 Oct 2005
Posts: 26

PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2015 4:55 pm    Post subject: Just installed Gentoo from scratch, and switched to KDE. Reply with quote

Hi All

TLDR: THANK YOU GENTOO! :-)
4 evenings, 2 drives dedicated to Gentoo, "committing" to using KDE. Everything is very slick and smooth, out of the box. Very happy! This time I'm not hacking things "my way". I did it "the right way". My "hacks" will be confined to containers and cloud boxes. I've come over to the "light side". :-)

AND FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER I CAN EMERGE EVERYTHING WITHOUT ANY CONFLICTS!!!!

I've been using Gentoo on and off for many years - but I'll admit. I'm quite a stubborn guy, and I've never had the patience to follow the docs to the letter, preferring to do things "my way".

The result was that my Gentoo installations have always been very esoteric, and seldom well rounded. Ie. I have my own init system that consists of just a single shell script with a lot of ampersands in it, and just one other shell script that manages my Wi-Fi and power management. And I use vanilla Compiz (with lots of special effects... if I'm feeling "fancy". and lots of shortcut keys) or WindowMaker (default boot so it works everywhere) as my desktop. I echo stuff to /sys/power/state or /proc/sysrq to sleep, power off, etc. So it's nice and lean, it's only a few hundred MB and it boots off a flash disc virtually anywhere, and is fast!

BUT! I thought I'd post to share with you the elation of my latest commitment. After nibbling on KDE over the past 20 years, and never fully committing to using any environment, with Ubuntu's Gnome Legacy/Classic being the closest to a Linux default to me, besides WindowManager, I thought I'd try DO THINGS RIGHT (TM). Or at least more conventionally.

I have a very expensive internet connection at home, so I made a full offline snapshot of the official mirrors on my uncapped connection at work, which I started from. (FYI distfiles weighs in at quite a light 177GB, with the full mirror at 285GB.)

So over the past 4 evenings, I put 2 FULL drives aside (you see there, not just a partition that'll eventually fill up, like every other Linux install of mine), RAID10'ed them (Double the speed of RAID1) and started loading Gentoo on it. Recompiling everything from scratch, just for my CPU and system.

And I decided to give KDE a fair shot, and stick with stable ie. qt4 and gtk3 where I must. Only the modules I need for my machines. Any generic builds or binary distributions I'll put in docker instances, and roll them out where necessary.

Well, it's just been 3 days on KDE. But everything is SMOOTH and SO BEAUTIFUL. Out of the box. Even the fonts... I've done no tweaking except in the packages installed.

So here's a huge THANK YOU to everyone Gentoo!

For the first time, ever, I have a Linux Home that I feel comfortable in, and that I am happy duplicating to my laptop and other workstations.

Some stats / info:

So, this machine is an i7 930 clocked to 4Ghz. But it only has 4GB of RAM. So...

On the first night, I got the base system going, and all the KDE dependencies, and X only took a few hours. I was working from my KDE environment within around 3 or 4 hours. Firefox compiled in another hour or so.

But then some surprises:
Chromium crashed twice, trying to compile it with -j8. It eats too much RAM. -j2 it crashed while I decided I'll compile LibreOffice at the same time. So I did LibreOffice first, that took around half a day. Then afterward, I did Chromium, which probably took around 6 hours with -j2.

It's really quite ridiculous that Chromium should be so much bigger than the Kernel, LibreOffice and Firefox. In fact, I think it took longer to compile than all of these put together. I'm not sure if I'm happy trusting that much code running on my system! I mean!!! What have they got in there?! I'm so going to put it in a jail and limit it's resources. It's the only thing that's been bringing my Ubuntu systems down - and Ubuntu really gets itself in knots it can't get out of when it runs out of RAM - out of the box.

Anyways. In my experience Gentoo is around 30% faster than anything else. I'm not the biggest fan of Arch, simply because it's commands are a bit silly - and I like how quick and easy it is to set up my own customized binary distribution with Gentoo.

So.... Gentoo has some rough edges. The docs are quite elaborate, and a little out of date here and there. But lets see... perhaps this new stable environment will make it easier for me to get to a point where I can work some contributions into my routine.

So, I have a clean, uncluttered, slick desktop, for the first time ever, that I'm going to make a point of using - for emails, design and dev work - and not breaking. My idea is to duplicate it to a "dev" machine, and if I experiment with anything, I'll make a snapshot there, and try what I like and mess around a few days, before I replicate things back to my main box.

What I would like to get to is a repeatable, easy "holy grail" setup that will work great for almost anyone. Ie. sets of use flags, with estimated disk usage and CPU cost stats... that comes with a sandbox, and that anyone can easily replicate if they like. Eventually. And an automated security notifier / advisory which will spot and optionally confine any confirmed security problems.

And I'll put a few hours a month aside to spend on the forums to get to know people and to make sure I'm not duplicating anything that's been done before.


$ qlist -I | wc -l
1117
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md127 459G 17G 419G 4% /
dev 10M 0 10M 0% /dev
shm 2.0G 23M 2.0G 2% /dev/shm
cgroup_root 10M 0 10M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdb2 1.8T 1.3T 460G 74% /mnt/sdb2 # my drive with ubuntu and gentoo mirrors on them

... My use flags and package list:
Still too ashamed to post this because I don't understand all of them... but I will soon! :-) And it works. I have over 800 lines in /etc/portage/package.use/*

[screenshot ... have to figure out how to post this still...]
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Naib
Watchman
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6051
Location: Removed by Neddy

PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2015 5:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I try a few, but I keep coming back to Openbox.
I started linux using windowmaker and I still <3 it

Had GNOME install for the wife but that was replaced with cinnamon once sysd was hard depended on it
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The Doctor
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Joined: 27 Jul 2010
Posts: 2678

PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2015 5:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I tried almost the entire range for a long time. I was even switching back and forth between KDE and Gnome3 just to show I could and I really wanted to give Gnome a chance before bashing it. Then I met i3 and it just fit my workflow so perfectly. No more wasting time trying to get windows either full screen or organized with no wasted space between them!

Since then I have switched to i3 and haven't looked back.
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.
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NeddySeagoon
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Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54099
Location: 56N 3W

PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2015 6:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I started out on GNOME as that what Red Hat 6.1 defaulted to when I started with linux in 1999.
I stuck with GNOME until it got harder and harder to keep systemd off my system.

I'm now a happy xfce user, with no automatic anything but everything justworks.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
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ct85711
Veteran
Veteran


Joined: 27 Sep 2005
Posts: 1791

PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2015 10:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I started out on using Gnome 1 and KDE 1 way back on the original Red Hat distro, constantly switching back and forth between both of them. After a while on using Gnome 2, I started getting more upset that everything wanted to be connected each other and connected to social media (I also disliked their switch on menu system too). This was really annoying, as why do I want an WM connected to a fb account that I didn't even have/nor want at the time. Sadly about the same time, KDE started following the same road, Gnome was going down, which forced me away from them. I ended up on XFCE, which I've been content with the simplicity of it. Anymore, I am content in that I don't need any fancy bells and whisles, or some special menu system that trying to help me (but yet does the opposite and hinders me from working).
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wuzzerd
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Joined: 05 Jan 2005
Posts: 466
Location: New Mexico

PostPosted: Thu Jun 04, 2015 12:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Fluxbox with homebrew right click menu and custom key bindings to load things I use a lot, like firefox xterm...

File Manager: mc
Network manager: ifconfig
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davidm
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Joined: 26 Apr 2009
Posts: 557
Location: US

PostPosted: Thu Jun 04, 2015 1:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

For the last three years I've mostly been running KDE. But before that I've used lots of different WM and DEs including Gnome, Xfce, Unity, fluxbox, xmonad and stumpwm.

Many reading this will probably find this strange but at the moment the biggest reason I run KDE is for the file ratings and tags and how it integrates with Dolphin the file manager. I also appreciate the extreme customization options KDE tends to offer in comparison to other options.
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khumba
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Joined: 16 Jun 2011
Posts: 51

PostPosted: Thu Jun 04, 2015 5:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I switch it up every couple weeks. Awesomewm has a special place in my heart; love the tag system, the layouts, the multi-head support, how it keeps out of your way. I used to run a heavily modified config but I have a fairly vanilla one now, the only serious add-on is per-desktop screen inverting. Then KDE for when I want a traditional desktop, but my laptop can run out of memory on big compilations, and I miss having a single, easy-to-backup config file. Openbox if I'm feeling minimalistic, and FVWM if I'm feeling like I haven't quite modded my desktop enough. FVWM has some weird bugs though, like numlock breaking its bindings, keybindings sometimes being ignored until you change window focus, and SLiM and it not playing well.

So I'm not sure how to answer your poll. I stick with these four, but rotate frequently. Enjoy your latest Gentoo and KDE. It's so solid on Gentoo thanks to being up-to-date and lack of customizations (and leaving out nepomuk, etc., although even with those built in, it somehow seems more stable than with other distros). For a powerful machine it's an excellent choice.

800+ lines in package.use/ isn't bad as long as you have it organized; I've got 970 but 855 of those are dependencies, mostly 32-bit baggage that Wine dragged in :).
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EmaRsk
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Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 158
Location: Italy

PostPosted: Thu Jun 04, 2015 6:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Naib wrote:
I try a few, but I keep coming back to Openbox.

+1
I did a lot of wm-hopping, trying almost everything I could manage to install or compile.
I realized pretty soon that I have absolutely no need for a desktop environment. Actually, I find the minimalistic approach to more of my fetish.
I used fvwm, ratpoison and dwm for extended periods of time, and tried to like many others, but eventually I always fell back to Openbox.
Even though I use no-borders full-screen windows most of the time (so the WM is largely irrelevant), I find that Openbox just doesn't expose rough edges when I don't, unlike other WMs that I otherwise liked.
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sitquietly
Tux's lil' helper
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Joined: 23 Oct 2010
Posts: 143
Location: On the Wolf River, Tennessee

PostPosted: Thu Jun 04, 2015 7:26 pm    Post subject: Re: Just installed Gentoo from scratch, and switched to KDE. Reply with quote

MrIncredible wrote:
.....
4 evenings, 2 drives dedicated to Gentoo, "committing" to using KDE. Everything is very slick and smooth, out of the box. Very happy! This time I'm not hacking things "my way". I did it "the right way". My "hacks" will be confined to containers and cloud boxes. I've come over to the "light side". :-)
.....


Congratulations, Mr. Incredible! It was fun to read your report :)

The one thing that keeps KDE Light (USE="-avahi -zeroconf -bluray -gconf -gtk3 -ipod -kdepim -kontact -libnotify -libsamplerate -mtp -mysql -nepomuk -pulseaudio -raw -semantic-desktop -soprano -startup-notification -wmf") running on my workstation as my secondary desktop is its wonderful handling of sessions. When I have a lot of course work or programming projects to work on it can be very helpful to stretch the work out over multiple workspaces and activities, with a different background and widgets on each workspace. That is very helpful keeping track of the real work, but perhaps the best part is that if I have to log out or reboot for any reason (e.g. an electrical storm knocks my power out for a few seconds) it ALL comes right back where I left off.

I enjoy my good old simple desktop with fluxbox and rox filer, rox panel, rox pinboard, most of the time. I have that same desktop (the same home folder on ZFS) whether I boot Gentoo (Funtoo) or FreeBSD; but I have to admit that KDE is only a little slower but very, very productive (and as you found, it is good looking).

You've inspired me to log out of my fluxbox and enjoy KDE for a while...

Good luck with those USE flags! Gentoo and Funtoo are quite forgiving of messing around with them until you get what you want.
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