Michael M. wrote:
On Sun, 2007-02-11 at 06:12 +0100, Joe Hart wrote:
The fact that we have an opportunity to discuss the differences in our
desktop environments is a good thing, because in the Windows world I had
no choice. Now there's at least six, probably a more and I haven't
heard of them. One that I really like is XFCE. Version 4.4 is quite
impressive. I read EL17 is also quite good.
Actually there are quite a few alternative shells available for Windows
(at least for XP and prior, I've no idea how they'll run on Vista). I
used a number of them back in Windows days -- in fact, I used Blackbox
on Windows before I ever tried it on any Linux distro. Overall there
aren't as many alternatives available as there are DE's and WM's for
most Linux distros, but also keep in mind that many distros limit the
number of options that are easily installable. Personally, I dislike
distros that are KDE- or Gnome-centric, but many are.
Did you install XFCE 4.4 from source? Because it's not available in
Etch repositories, and won't ever be since Etch is frozen. Same goes
for EL17.
I prefer KDE, mainly because it works well for me. I dislike gnome
because of it's oversimplification. A lightweight WM is nice, but I
don't notice a lot of speed difference due to the heavy amount of
caching that KDE does. This desktop is relatively new and has a gig of
RAM, so I don't mind the heavy resource drain.
On another machine I have Sarge installed and setup as a server, with no
GUI so that I can practice my networking administration skills from a
command line. One of the things I like so much about Linux is that I
have a powerful command line again. I have been missing that for many
years. I just wish I had made the switch to Linux years before I
actually did. Reading about some of the old Red Hat stories sounds like
they were fun times. Now that things have advanced to the point that
Joe Sixpack could do an install, it's not quite the same.
I downloaded a copy of Xubuntu and ran it live just to check out. It is
amazing how many different distros I have tried. I definitely had a
case of bad case of distroitis. I hear it's common among newbies, and
hits again when one reaches the noob stage.
Joe
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