7 ms·

The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar t

The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gnome, Unity, and KDE?

coleifer 13y ago
Sounds like another satisfied Apple customer.
ANTSANTS 13y ago
I think it's worth noting that there's never been a "weird" WM/DE that attracted a sizeable userbase purely on its own merits. Gnome 3 and Unity were to a great extent forced upon their users. If there were real benefits to means of desktop interaction that differed significantly from the established "Windows 95" and "tiling WM" modes, you'd think there'd be a few enthusiasts on the side exploring this realm and touting its productivity advantages. I'd bet the majority of the lightweight "Windows 95 clone" WMs and DEs exist because GNOME and (to a lesser extent) KDE alienated their userbases by trying to be "different" and "next generation" (mostly by poorly cloning OSX and the latest Windows version that nobody liked anyway), so I'd hesitate to say that experimentation should be left to them. EDIT: Many commercial products suffer from this problem where the existing version is "good enough" and people are happy using it for several hours a day, but the producer needs to convince users to purchase the new version anyway, so they end up adding a lot of pointless, irritating, and even product-breaking changes just to make the new version seem revolutionary and worthy of an upgrade, even if it's actually making the product worse. Many open source devs don't seem to have realized that there is no reason for them to play this game. They don't need to sell anyone a new version in a cardboard box, so there's no conflict of interest here; they can do less work and make their users more happy by keeping things stable and incrementally improving things. Yet, very often, they ape Microsoft, Adobe, and company's spastic thrashing anyway. More ribbons!
- kijin 13y ago
  I agree. A desktop environment is one of those things where familiarity trumps innovations. It's like your living room. You might do innovating things in your living room from time to time, but most people would say that the living room itself should remain familiar, conservative, and all around comfortable. You really don't want to re-learn how to sit down in your own couch. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only time when a massive change to the desktop environment is warranted is when there's a massive change to the physical method that people use to interact with computers. The widespread availability of the mouse gave rise to the now-familiar WIMP paradigm. The introduction of multi-touch triggered another round of innovation, but I doubt that this can be backported to keyboard-and-mouse devices any more than Photoshop can be backported to mouseless terminals.
  - leoedin 13y ago
    When Windows 7 came out I hated the new menu bar. After using it for a few years I curse Windows XP every time I have to use it. Sometimes change is good. Just because we do something one particular way (in the world of desktop environments this is often down to a decision made in the early 90s) doesn't mean that it's the most productive method of doing it. Often initially unpopular changes in user interface prove to be more effective. The problem is that change for changes sake is different to change for UI improvements sake, but the two are often hard to distinguish between. How do we know that a new UI implementation is better or worse than the old one? You don't really until it's being used in the real world. There's not an easy answer, but I don't think that grinding innovation to a halt is the right one. I guess the beauty of the open source world is that there's room for a minimal non-progressive UI as well as a number of innovative ones.
    - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
      Yeah don't want to get into a big thread about the menu ribbon bar - but the principle reason it is actually worse is, each item in the bar is rendered differently, making it worse for learning by new users. XP-style text menus you could at least search methodically, pulling down each one and opening each submenu until you found something. The ribbon on the other hand, is hard to search at all with different fonts and text positions and icons all scrambled together. So the menu bar wins now, but principally because its learned (the hard way). Now it would be even harder to switch to anything else.
wtracy 13y ago
http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/ http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/ http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/ http://windowmaker.org/ http://windowmaker.org/
- WoodenChair 13y ago
  etoileos - last news update 2012 and wasn't even about the project fluxbox - active and kind've interesting awesome - more of just a WM than full DE ratpoison - ditto enlightenment - okay, kind've resembles Win 95 too... but more of a DE than the others you listed windowmaker - been around forever; hasn't really "innovated" in forever; just a NeXT clone if I remember correctly for GNUStep I think my point stands. I was talking about LXDE, Xfce, and RazorQT.
  - girvo 13y ago
    etioleos actually does have some stuff happening, if you go and look at the mailing list :)
    - voltagex_ 13y ago
      I really really think these projects need to have an automated notification to the devs to update their news page, or even automagically post a digest of mailing list activity. Lots of projects I've thought were dead have had lots of stuff going on behind the scenes.
    - astrobe_ 13y ago
      > etioleos dat Typo. "étiolé"= withered in French.
  - scythe 13y ago
    >windowmaker - been around forever; hasn't really "innovated" in forever; just a NeXT clone if I remember correctly for GNUStep >enlightenment - okay, kind've resembles Win 95 too... but more of a DE than the others you listed > etoileos - last news update 2012 and wasn't even about the project What you seem to be missing is that these projects died because people thought they were weird, which is to say, innovation in the DE space pays negative rent, and that's no good, especially not from the perspective of an open-source project, which, the social dynamics of open-source dictate that projects need to acquire a large userbase to sustain an active development community for more than a couple years, that is to say, to make people keep working on it after the "new project smell" wears off. In other words your observation is a direct consequence of the choices in DE that users have made and continue to make. The recent trend has been towards modularity, and while you dismiss awesome and ratpoison, a major boon of LXDE et al is that, unlike Windows 95, you can replace the window manager with xmonad and still use all of the other components of LXDE. Modularity brings innovation to the people who want it while satisfying the large majority of users who apparently do not. There's no reason for LXDE to ship anything but Openbox; LXDE could certainly switch to xmonad tomorrow, but their users wouldn't be happy. And who wants that?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nknighthb 13y ago
I would be happier if experimentation had been left to the lightweight environments. The past ~ten years of GNOME and KDE "innovation" has led to a place where I'm not able to use Linux as a desktop -- I can't get work done in the well-supported/well-integrated environments, and I no longer have the time or energy to fight with the others.
buckbova 13y ago
Forget Win95, something like AIX's CDE is all I ever really needed. http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/ http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/ It's not all about resources. I don't want animations for every action. For me simplicity is elegance.
- adestefan 13y ago
  Having used CDE on both Solaris and Tru64 I can say that CDE was a steaming pile. The day CDE replaced OpenWindows in Solaris was a sad day.
- Gorkys 13y ago
  Wow! You're the first person I've ever heard of who actually liked CDE. Did you ever actually use it?
  - buckbova 12y ago
    In the late 90's I used these beautiful AIX desktop machines from IBM. However, I did spend the majority of time in the terminal window. I installed FreeBSD at home and attempted to emulate the setup, but never got it quite right.
slacka 13y ago
> However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? If you care about UX innovation, LXDE is not for you. That niche is filled by KDE 4, Gnome 3, and Unity. With XP support ending, I've used LXDE (Lubuntu) to rescue 2 old family machines that Gnome 3 and KDE couldn't handle without thrashing. How does the memory usage of LXQt Desktop compare to LXDE and Razor-qt? I hope they've managed to keep it down.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bgibson 13y ago
Check out Elementary OS - Ubuntu with the DE rewritten in Vala with design as priority: http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/
- reidrac 13y ago
  Why is Vala a "feature" worth mentioning? I mean, I don't use software and notice the language used to program it. IMHO I've used buggy software that happens to be written in Vala, but I wouldn't say it is because of the language.
byuu 13y ago
If I want an environment for my cell phone or tablet, I'll use an environment designed for a cell phone or tablet; like Metro, Gnome, Unity and Android. If I want an environment for my desktop, I'll use an environment designed for a desktop; like Windows 95 - 7, Gnome2, KDE3, Xfce and LXDE. My desktop has a keyboard and a mouse, not a touchscreen. In fact, I really don't want to be touching my $1200 ZR30w monitor anyway, even if it were touch-enabled. Cell phone OSes on the desktop work about as well as desktop OSes do on cell phones. Play to strengths, do not reduce to the lowest common denominator. If an idea objectively improves productivity, I will give it a fair chance. And we have certainly seen that since Windows 95: most notably with tabbed interfaces. But I can't stand change for the sake of change. Just because an idea is old does not mean it is bad.
- jqm 13y ago
  “There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.” -John Brunner
- anon4 13y ago
  I feel KDE4 has managed to keep close enough to a normal desktop environment, even though they've been touched by the braindamage known as "semantic desktop search", which insists on taking up tons of resources to index your half-terabyte home directory that you've already organised for easy access. LXQt seems like it could become what KDE should have been. All they really need is to also merge with the Trinity people.
  - scrollaway 13y ago
    LXQt and KDE may be similar but they're not the same at all. A merge would simply be impossible, both on a technical level and on a social level (nobody would accept it in either community).

coleifer 13y ago

Sounds like another satisfied Apple customer.

ANTSANTS 13y ago

I think it's worth noting that there's never been a "weird" WM/DE that attracted a sizeable userbase purely on its own merits. Gnome 3 and Unity were to a great extent forced upon their users. If there were real benefits to means of desktop interaction that differed significantly from the established "Windows 95" and "tiling WM" modes, you'd think there'd be a few enthusiasts on the side exploring this realm and touting its productivity advantages. I'd bet the majority of the lightweight "Windows 95 clone" WMs and DEs exist because GNOME and (to a lesser extent) KDE alienated their userbases by trying to be "different" and "next generation" (mostly by poorly cloning OSX and the latest Windows version that nobody liked anyway), so I'd hesitate to say that experimentation should be left to them. EDIT: Many commercial products suffer from this problem where the existing version is "good enough" and people are happy using it for several hours a day, but the producer needs to convince users to purchase the new version anyway, so they end up adding a lot of pointless, irritating, and even product-breaking changes just to make the new version seem revolutionary and worthy of an upgrade, even if it's actually making the product worse. Many open source devs don't seem to have realized that there is no reason for them to play this game. They don't need to sell anyone a new version in a cardboard box, so there's no conflict of interest here; they can do less work and make their users more happy by keeping things stable and incrementally improving things. Yet, very often, they ape Microsoft, Adobe, and company's spastic thrashing anyway. More ribbons!

kijin 13y ago
I agree. A desktop environment is one of those things where familiarity trumps innovations. It's like your living room. You might do innovating things in your living room from time to time, but most people would say that the living room itself should remain familiar, conservative, and all around comfortable. You really don't want to re-learn how to sit down in your own couch. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only time when a massive change to the desktop environment is warranted is when there's a massive change to the physical method that people use to interact with computers. The widespread availability of the mouse gave rise to the now-familiar WIMP paradigm. The introduction of multi-touch triggered another round of innovation, but I doubt that this can be backported to keyboard-and-mouse devices any more than Photoshop can be backported to mouseless terminals.
- leoedin 13y ago
  When Windows 7 came out I hated the new menu bar. After using it for a few years I curse Windows XP every time I have to use it. Sometimes change is good. Just because we do something one particular way (in the world of desktop environments this is often down to a decision made in the early 90s) doesn't mean that it's the most productive method of doing it. Often initially unpopular changes in user interface prove to be more effective. The problem is that change for changes sake is different to change for UI improvements sake, but the two are often hard to distinguish between. How do we know that a new UI implementation is better or worse than the old one? You don't really until it's being used in the real world. There's not an easy answer, but I don't think that grinding innovation to a halt is the right one. I guess the beauty of the open source world is that there's room for a minimal non-progressive UI as well as a number of innovative ones.
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    Yeah don't want to get into a big thread about the menu ribbon bar - but the principle reason it is actually worse is, each item in the bar is rendered differently, making it worse for learning by new users. XP-style text menus you could at least search methodically, pulling down each one and opening each submenu until you found something. The ribbon on the other hand, is hard to search at all with different fonts and text positions and icons all scrambled together. So the menu bar wins now, but principally because its learned (the hard way). Now it would be even harder to switch to anything else.

wtracy 13y ago

http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/ http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/ http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/ http://windowmaker.org/ http://windowmaker.org/

WoodenChair 13y ago
etoileos - last news update 2012 and wasn't even about the project fluxbox - active and kind've interesting awesome - more of just a WM than full DE ratpoison - ditto enlightenment - okay, kind've resembles Win 95 too... but more of a DE than the others you listed windowmaker - been around forever; hasn't really "innovated" in forever; just a NeXT clone if I remember correctly for GNUStep I think my point stands. I was talking about LXDE, Xfce, and RazorQT.
- girvo 13y ago
  etioleos actually does have some stuff happening, if you go and look at the mailing list :)
  - voltagex_ 13y ago
    I really really think these projects need to have an automated notification to the devs to update their news page, or even automagically post a digest of mailing list activity. Lots of projects I've thought were dead have had lots of stuff going on behind the scenes.
  - astrobe_ 13y ago
    > etioleos dat Typo. "étiolé"= withered in French.
- scythe 13y ago
  >windowmaker - been around forever; hasn't really "innovated" in forever; just a NeXT clone if I remember correctly for GNUStep >enlightenment - okay, kind've resembles Win 95 too... but more of a DE than the others you listed > etoileos - last news update 2012 and wasn't even about the project What you seem to be missing is that these projects died because people thought they were weird, which is to say, innovation in the DE space pays negative rent, and that's no good, especially not from the perspective of an open-source project, which, the social dynamics of open-source dictate that projects need to acquire a large userbase to sustain an active development community for more than a couple years, that is to say, to make people keep working on it after the "new project smell" wears off. In other words your observation is a direct consequence of the choices in DE that users have made and continue to make. The recent trend has been towards modularity, and while you dismiss awesome and ratpoison, a major boon of LXDE et al is that, unlike Windows 95, you can replace the window manager with xmonad and still use all of the other components of LXDE. Modularity brings innovation to the people who want it while satisfying the large majority of users who apparently do not. There's no reason for LXDE to ship anything but Openbox; LXDE could certainly switch to xmonad tomorrow, but their users wouldn't be happy. And who wants that?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

nknighthb 13y ago

I would be happier if experimentation had been left to the lightweight environments. The past ~ten years of GNOME and KDE "innovation" has led to a place where I'm not able to use Linux as a desktop -- I can't get work done in the well-supported/well-integrated environments, and I no longer have the time or energy to fight with the others.

buckbova 13y ago

Forget Win95, something like AIX's CDE is all I ever really needed. http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/ http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/ It's not all about resources. I don't want animations for every action. For me simplicity is elegance.

adestefan 13y ago
Having used CDE on both Solaris and Tru64 I can say that CDE was a steaming pile. The day CDE replaced OpenWindows in Solaris was a sad day.
Gorkys 13y ago
Wow! You're the first person I've ever heard of who actually liked CDE. Did you ever actually use it?
- buckbova 12y ago
  In the late 90's I used these beautiful AIX desktop machines from IBM. However, I did spend the majority of time in the terminal window. I installed FreeBSD at home and attempted to emulate the setup, but never got it quite right.

slacka 13y ago

> However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? If you care about UX innovation, LXDE is not for you. That niche is filled by KDE 4, Gnome 3, and Unity. With XP support ending, I've used LXDE (Lubuntu) to rescue 2 old family machines that Gnome 3 and KDE couldn't handle without thrashing. How does the memory usage of LXQt Desktop compare to LXDE and Razor-qt? I hope they've managed to keep it down.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bgibson 13y ago

Check out Elementary OS - Ubuntu with the DE rewritten in Vala with design as priority: http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/

reidrac 13y ago
Why is Vala a "feature" worth mentioning? I mean, I don't use software and notice the language used to program it. IMHO I've used buggy software that happens to be written in Vala, but I wouldn't say it is because of the language.

byuu 13y ago

If I want an environment for my cell phone or tablet, I'll use an environment designed for a cell phone or tablet; like Metro, Gnome, Unity and Android. If I want an environment for my desktop, I'll use an environment designed for a desktop; like Windows 95 - 7, Gnome2, KDE3, Xfce and LXDE. My desktop has a keyboard and a mouse, not a touchscreen. In fact, I really don't want to be touching my $1200 ZR30w monitor anyway, even if it were touch-enabled. Cell phone OSes on the desktop work about as well as desktop OSes do on cell phones. Play to strengths, do not reduce to the lowest common denominator. If an idea objectively improves productivity, I will give it a fair chance. And we have certainly seen that since Windows 95: most notably with tabbed interfaces. But I can't stand change for the sake of change. Just because an idea is old does not mean it is bad.

jqm 13y ago
“There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.” -John Brunner
anon4 13y ago
I feel KDE4 has managed to keep close enough to a normal desktop environment, even though they've been touched by the braindamage known as "semantic desktop search", which insists on taking up tons of resources to index your half-terabyte home directory that you've already organised for easy access. LXQt seems like it could become what KDE should have been. All they really need is to also merge with the Trinity people.
- scrollaway 13y ago
  LXQt and KDE may be similar but they're not the same at all. A merge would simply be impossible, both on a technical level and on a social level (nobody would accept it in either community).