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Where should one go for a future proof DESKTOP OS these days? Many are ruining the desktop experience because "mobile". KDE seems to be the only UI remaining t

Where should one go for a future proof DESKTOP OS these days? Many are ruining the desktop experience because "mobile". KDE seems to be the only UI remaining that is sane for the desktop.

npsimons 13y ago
I just switched from GNOME to XFCE after upgrading my main home machine running Debian. I knew the changes were coming, but didn't think they'd be as bad as they were. The transition has been . . . interesting, but mostly tolerable because I pretty much live in Emacs, Firefox and the terminal. I'm actually kind of liking having way more screensavers than I really need (with XScreenSaver versus whatever the GNOME pared down version was), and having less crud and cruft bogging down my lowly old laptop.
- kmm 13y ago
  I'm debating going to XFCE too. The only thing I'll miss is extending my desktop with Javascript. I see XFCE has extensions too, but they're in C. I like C, but when I see how many lines a simple CPU frequency plugin needs [0], while a comparable extension for GNOME would only be a few hundred lines... 0: http://git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-cpufreq-plugin/tree/panel-plugin http://git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-cpufreq-plugin/tree/...
jmhain 13y ago
I don't know why people claim that gnome 3 is for mobile. On my nexus 7, it's an unusable piece of crap but on my desktop/laptop, I've never been more productive with anything else.
- Aardwolf 13y ago
  I don't know whether it's for mobile or not, it just seems that whenever a sucky change is made to a desktop UI it's "for mobile". All I see is that it (and other products) are, despite a previous evolution of 20+ years of desktop UI history, now getting worse instead of better. But maybe you're right, it's not always mobile, sometimes it's making a UI noob-oriented at the cost of productivity. Which is just as annoying.
Jach 13y ago
I've been happily using Gentoo since 2006 or 2007 across different machines and expect to continue using it for at least the next 5 years, but it's not for everyone. I usually hear nice things about Arch, it's been around just as long. For an Ubuntu replacement that looks like it's going to be around for a while, there's Mint.. though I tried it recently and didn't like it and thought parts were poorly designed if they're trying to target an audience that doesn't even know what a shell is. On Gentoo I'm still using the last release of gnome2. Xfce4 is almost as good, and for newbies I tend to recommend Xubuntu and Mint together for them to choose... MATE is a community fork of gnome2, a version of which is on Mint (that I don't like as much as vanilla gnome2).
- raylu 13y ago
  > I usually hear nice things about Arch That's because you're hanging out with too many Gentoo users. The Arch Way[1] is stupid. Less broadly, it's a poor, knee-jerk reaction to Debian maintainers' over-zealous patching of software. Trusting upstream software maintainers to properly tag "stable" releases (which means something different for everyone) and to work with the rest of the software in the system is a mistake. Also, that's the entire point of package maintainers maintaining repositories. But that's OK. Something went wrong (again)? Just downgrade[2]! 1. Hope that the old package is in your cache 2. Hope that some repo mirror is out of date 3. Profit??? [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Downgrading_Packages#Finding_your_older_version https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Downgrading_Packages#Fi...
jlgreco 13y ago
> future proof DESKTOP OS This is something I obsess over. Use minimalist software that you are fairly confident that you could fix or recreate in another environment if necessary; for example, don't use gnome-screensaver but instead use slock. Where possible, use software suites where being future-proof is a first-class priority; for example, wherever possible use TeXLive. Consider something standards complaint with a rabid user-base over alternatives; for example, use Vim instead of Kwrite. (In fact, take a list of the packages in the current Ubuntu livecd, and the packages in the current Kubuntu livecd. XOR the lists. The result is a list of software you should not spent time building skills in if you don't want your skills to become obsolete in 5 years.) Where you are not confident that you can pick something that meets any of these suggestions, pick the simplest software that you don't have to customize and that you will miss the least. For example, don't roll your own X window manager and don't use BerylFusion after setting three dozen options. Use firefox or chrome, but don't marry yourself to a combination of two dozen highly specialized extensions. In an effort to future-proof my computer experience I follow these self-imposed restrictions. Additionally, I have a strict whitelist of software that I am willing to configure: zsh, vim, tmux, elinks (only because I could bare to lose it. It is not future-proof), urxvt (very begrudgingly, I only set my font and background color), and Awesome (very very very begrudgingly. The only configuration of it that I am willing to do is set my terminal to urxvt.) Any other software I use "as is", with the expectation that it could be obsolete and abandoned tomorrow. Brief example of something that drove me to adopt this sort of attitude: I used to use Amarok to play all of music, and got very used to my setup. Amarok 2 came and wrecked everything, completely erasing all the mental effort I had put into Amarok over the years. Upset by this, I decided that life would be simpler if I just wrote my own very simple xmms2 client that I would never change out from under myself. This worked great for about two years until the breaking changes to xmms2 (requiring me to make changes to my client every few months) wore me down. Now I just use mplayer, a shell, and standard unix utilities. Even if I have to swap out mplayer I am confident I will never have to change my workflow again on a unix-like computer with keyboard.

Where should one go for a future proof DESKTOP OS these days? Many are ruining the desktop experience because "mobile". KDE seems to be the only UI remaining that is sane for the desktop.

npsimons 13y ago

I just switched from GNOME to XFCE after upgrading my main home machine running Debian. I knew the changes were coming, but didn't think they'd be as bad as they were. The transition has been . . . interesting, but mostly tolerable because I pretty much live in Emacs, Firefox and the terminal. I'm actually kind of liking having way more screensavers than I really need (with XScreenSaver versus whatever the GNOME pared down version was), and having less crud and cruft bogging down my lowly old laptop.

kmm 13y ago
I'm debating going to XFCE too. The only thing I'll miss is extending my desktop with Javascript. I see XFCE has extensions too, but they're in C. I like C, but when I see how many lines a simple CPU frequency plugin needs [0], while a comparable extension for GNOME would only be a few hundred lines... 0: http://git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-cpufreq-plugin/tree/panel-plugin http://git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-cpufreq-plugin/tree/...

jmhain 13y ago

I don't know why people claim that gnome 3 is for mobile. On my nexus 7, it's an unusable piece of crap but on my desktop/laptop, I've never been more productive with anything else.

Aardwolf 13y ago
I don't know whether it's for mobile or not, it just seems that whenever a sucky change is made to a desktop UI it's "for mobile". All I see is that it (and other products) are, despite a previous evolution of 20+ years of desktop UI history, now getting worse instead of better. But maybe you're right, it's not always mobile, sometimes it's making a UI noob-oriented at the cost of productivity. Which is just as annoying.

Jach 13y ago

I've been happily using Gentoo since 2006 or 2007 across different machines and expect to continue using it for at least the next 5 years, but it's not for everyone. I usually hear nice things about Arch, it's been around just as long. For an Ubuntu replacement that looks like it's going to be around for a while, there's Mint.. though I tried it recently and didn't like it and thought parts were poorly designed if they're trying to target an audience that doesn't even know what a shell is. On Gentoo I'm still using the last release of gnome2. Xfce4 is almost as good, and for newbies I tend to recommend Xubuntu and Mint together for them to choose... MATE is a community fork of gnome2, a version of which is on Mint (that I don't like as much as vanilla gnome2).

raylu 13y ago
> I usually hear nice things about Arch That's because you're hanging out with too many Gentoo users. The Arch Way[1] is stupid. Less broadly, it's a poor, knee-jerk reaction to Debian maintainers' over-zealous patching of software. Trusting upstream software maintainers to properly tag "stable" releases (which means something different for everyone) and to work with the rest of the software in the system is a mistake. Also, that's the entire point of package maintainers maintaining repositories. But that's OK. Something went wrong (again)? Just downgrade[2]! 1. Hope that the old package is in your cache 2. Hope that some repo mirror is out of date 3. Profit??? [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Downgrading_Packages#Finding_your_older_version https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Downgrading_Packages#Fi...

jlgreco 13y ago

> future proof DESKTOP OS This is something I obsess over. Use minimalist software that you are fairly confident that you could fix or recreate in another environment if necessary; for example, don't use gnome-screensaver but instead use slock. Where possible, use software suites where being future-proof is a first-class priority; for example, wherever possible use TeXLive. Consider something standards complaint with a rabid user-base over alternatives; for example, use Vim instead of Kwrite. (In fact, take a list of the packages in the current Ubuntu livecd, and the packages in the current Kubuntu livecd. XOR the lists. The result is a list of software you should not spent time building skills in if you don't want your skills to become obsolete in 5 years.) Where you are not confident that you can pick something that meets any of these suggestions, pick the simplest software that you don't have to customize and that you will miss the least. For example, don't roll your own X window manager and don't use BerylFusion after setting three dozen options. Use firefox or chrome, but don't marry yourself to a combination of two dozen highly specialized extensions. In an effort to future-proof my computer experience I follow these self-imposed restrictions. Additionally, I have a strict whitelist of software that I am willing to configure: zsh, vim, tmux, elinks (only because I could bare to lose it. It is not future-proof), urxvt (very begrudgingly, I only set my font and background color), and Awesome (very very very begrudgingly. The only configuration of it that I am willing to do is set my terminal to urxvt.) Any other software I use "as is", with the expectation that it could be obsolete and abandoned tomorrow. Brief example of something that drove me to adopt this sort of attitude: I used to use Amarok to play all of music, and got very used to my setup. Amarok 2 came and wrecked everything, completely erasing all the mental effort I had put into Amarok over the years. Upset by this, I decided that life would be simpler if I just wrote my own very simple xmms2 client that I would never change out from under myself. This worked great for about two years until the breaking changes to xmms2 (requiring me to make changes to my client every few months) wore me down. Now I just use mplayer, a shell, and standard unix utilities. Even if I have to swap out mplayer I am confident I will never have to change my workflow again on a unix-like computer with keyboard.