Full blown DE - what am I missing?

Jaglover

I run bare OpenBox and have all the computer functionality I can think of. However, there are KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, whatnot. Sometimes I think there must be something wrong with me, why I do not care for those wonderful (I assume) pieces of computer programming? Maybe I do not know what I am missing? So the question should be - what am I missing by not using those desktop environments? :roll:

Me scratching head.
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

I'm not sure why you are asking this as a Gentoo user. Our DE installations are just as 'full' blown as we like them to be, since we have the choice.

When you install plasma-meta all you get is a desktop workspace and not much more. I'm sure Gnome guys will know of similar minimal installations...

Naib · Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2017 7:14 pm Post subject:

What you are missing is the shackles that are applied in exchange for a few user comforts.

I have used openbox for soo long (windowmaker before that) and it does everything I need.
You add just what you want to autostart to make your life better.
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Jaglover · Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2017 7:26 pm Post subject:

Yea, I have wbar for most used applications and conky to report me what's going on, feh to draw the background and tint2 for taskbar. Rest comes from OpenBox menu. Maybe I should install full KDE to see what comfort comes with those shackles? I have plenty of RAM, my current setup runs in less than 90 MB ...
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AJM · Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2017 11:52 pm Post subject:

90MB doesn't sound like much nowadays, but the first PC I ran KDE on (in 1998) only had 32MB of RAM and it worked fine! I honestly can't think of anything useful at all that a current desktop environment does which that one didn't... there's been a lot of bloat in that time.

I have long since ditched KDE (at KDE4), first switching back to Enlightenment which I'd used previously... and ditched that for WindowMaker which I'd also used on my workstation in the early 2000s. It suits me perfectly, consumes next to no resources, is configurable enough to do exactly what I want and is impeccably stable. A very happy customer!

The amount of real choice we have in these matters is a great feature of the open source world. Some people like the (theoretically) consistent nature of a full DE and it makes life a lot easier for them; some of the rest of us have our workflows long since engrained into us and just wouldn't use most of the extra features of a full DE supposing they were there.

Jaglover · Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2017 12:24 am Post subject:

I have vague memories about KDE version 0.68 or was it 0.98 ... it was buggy as hell and slow on my 486DX. I think I had 8 MB of RAM.
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Proinsias · Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2017 1:53 am Post subject:

I've been running a pretty bare bones i3 or dwm setup for a few years now, the last year or so I've ditched conky too. It keeps me happy but I occasionally like to load up a full DE to see if it tempts me back. The last full DE I really enjoyed was Arch/systemd/Gnome3 but even then I still preferred i3/dwm most of the time.

Possibly worth installing a DE or trying out a distro with one all set up. I never got on with KDE but the ones I did take to; gnome, mate, xfce, cinnamon....after a while I felt they were more intrusive than helpful, I was spending time trying to get them out of sight.

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2017 10:13 am Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2017 2:06 pm Post subject:

Jaglover,

You are probably missing the extra bugs that come with extra code.
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Roman_Gruber · Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2017 9:08 pm Post subject:

you probably miss automounting

that automounting thing worked for a few months on gnome2.

i only miss that notifcation that i run from the battery or the battery is dead. I have not thought yet of a way to implement that in i3wm.

Jaglover · Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2017 9:55 pm Post subject:

Thunar file manager can automount. I'm not using that feature, though. I have mount USB/umount USB in my Openbox menu.
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Naib · Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2017 10:00 pm Post subject:

I use pcman-fm for USB automount because I am lazy. I also have Compton and conky for a bit of bling on the openbox desktop.
It really comes down to what do you want to sort out yourself to what do you expect to just work.

Those that like or need the bigger desktops want things to work and not bothered whether it is a concise or correct way, just work. It's one thing to jump through arbitrary hoops to get something to work compared to a reasonable set of config

Same with the type of people who buy apple laptops
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khayyam · Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2017 11:38 pm Post subject:

Jaglover ...

You're missing the experience™ of a usability clone, something that works best if that experience is coupled with you poking yourself in the ear with a knitting needle and so auto-lobotomising to the boot chime :)

If you happen to be a "professional" then you're also missing the opportunity to cause your employer to drool at the kachiiing of getting the same thing at a 50% reduction in costs (it helps if you look smug and repeat the words "because ... free" every other sentence).

best ... khay

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2017 10:14 am Post subject:

I don't miss auto mounting. I used to use DVD+RW with a random filesystem, just like a big floppy.
Every mount uses a superblock write and the media was only rated about 1000 writes.
Its very easy for an auto mounter to life the volume.

True, I could have used read only auto mount but that didn't help my use case, which was write mostly.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.