Linux General Questions

Xfce. It's the way to be.

I pretty much turn mine into the GNOME 2 style top-and-bottom-bars desktop.

That plus Synapse launcher plus Compiz (for Grid plugin) = desktop I keep coming back to, every time.

I try other setups from time to time, but Xfce is customizable without being painful. Tends to be a little lacking in the fit-and-finish, but for me, it's the most pain-free way to be. Customizing is flexible enough to avoid the pain of the overly-restrictive "easier" desktops, but it's mostly click-and-drag and avoids the pain of the overly text-config desktops.

I'm enjoying LXDE myself.

I use parts of LXDE a la carte with Openbox, but I have to say: running Linux Mint in a vm has been mostly very nice. I'm certain it'll have pain somewhere along the way, but it's certainly not giving me the fit I'm having with my other setup. Which, assuredly, is my own fault.

I've been using Cinnamon and quite like it. I have the navbar on one screen on the top, and I have the Cairo Dock on the bottom. It's a little OS X, but not really. I use OS X for my common apps to open, and I like having my 2nd monitor completely open and free, no taskbars or anything on it.

I have a pretty decently specced computer, so maybe that's why I find Cinnamon just fine. I don't think it requires a powerhouse of a PC to power it, but I know it takes more resources than MATE.

I find that as time goes on, I notice my window manager less and less.

My standard workspace is now:

Desktop1: XFCE4-Terminal with tmux (spans both heads)
Desktop2: 1 Firefox per head (no window decorations)
Desktop3: Emacs (spans both heads)

There's GNOME2/Compiz in there somewhere, but all it does is switch my virtual desktops.

I've got an old Dell 700m I've been toying with installing some flavor of Linux on -- right now, the thing is uselessly slow with Win XP. Really want to keep it lightweight and snappy as possible, just for browsing and minor Linux scripting / tinkering.

I'm thinking mint might be my best option based on what I've read here. For reference, it's a Pentium M, 1.6 ghz, I think maybe 1 GB of RAM, though could be 512 -- I'll have to double check.

What do you folks think?

Foxua wrote:

I've got an old Dell 700m I've been toying with installing some flavor of Linux on -- right now, the thing is uselessly slow with Win XP. Really want to keep it lightweight and snappy as possible, just for browsing and minor Linux scripting / tinkering.

I'm thinking mint might be my best option based on what I've read here. For reference, it's a Pentium M, 1.6 ghz, I think maybe 1 GB of RAM, though could be 512 -- I'll have to double check.

What do you folks think?

Something small and light... Check out Crunchbang Linux, that is a pretty nifty distro. You could also try a flavor of Ubuntu, maybe Xubuntu or Lubuntu, although 512mb of RAM is really pushing it.

For something really light, check out Puppy Linux.

Crunchbang is based on Slackware Openbox, which I use and love, but I'm not sure how much of an ease-of-use layer they built on top of it.

I can say Mint has been easy to play with. I can't speak to its overall stability and lack of cruft over the long haul, though.

muraii wrote:

Crunchbang is based on Slackware Openbox, which I use and love, but I'm not sure how much of an ease-of-use layer they built on top of it.

I can say Mint has been easy to play with. I can't speak to its overall stability and lack of cruft over the long haul, though.

I think it's pretty easy to use. It has Conky installed by default, and lists all the shortcuts you'll need. It's pretty spiffy.

I think Xubuntu is a pretty good choice for a new user on a memory-constrained system. It will run well and it's easy to get help with Ubuntu distributions.

EDIT: I guess the same applies to Mint w/MATE, though I have a bias toward XFCE on smaller systems.

Jarpy wrote:

I think Xubuntu is a pretty good choice for a new user on a memory-constrained system. It will run well and it's easy to get help with Ubuntu distributions.

EDIT: I guess the same applies to Mint w/MATE, though I have a bias toward XFCE on smaller systems.

For systems with very low memory, it's probably a good idea to look at LXDE. Especially if the system is primarily going to be used only for web-browsing.

Looks like the machine has 1 GB, so that gives me a little more breathing room. I'll mess around with the suggestions and see what works best. Thanks everyone for your input.

Jarpy wrote:

I think Xubuntu is a pretty good choice for a new user on a memory-constrained system. It will run well and it's easy to get help with Ubuntu distributions.

EDIT: I guess the same applies to Mint w/MATE, though I have a bias toward XFCE on smaller systems.

+1

Sigh. So I was trying to experiment some more with the various Mint versions, and I discovered a rather nasty bug in their installer: they make as much swap space as you have RAM. No matter how much RAM you have. This machine has 32 gigs, so it creates a 32-gig swapfile. On a 160-gig SSD, this hurts. (and it's just silly: you should never need more than 2G of swap. Anything past that won't be usable anyway.)

And the Mint installer won't allow you to manually set up the partitioning correctly to build an encrypted partition, and then put LVM on it. The manual tools have no capacity to do anything with LVM at all. The only option that uses LVM is if the installer builds everything for you, and then it sizes your swap to match your RAM.

Yeah, I could fix it, by removing the swap, extending the LVM volume before it, and then extending the enclosed filesystem to cover, but I just sighed, and figured that I'd live on my perfectly functional VMs, and wait for Ubuntu 13.10, which is out in a week or two.

It's weird that their installer has no LVM capability, when the Debian installer handles it perfectly well.

gore wrote:
Malor wrote:

Screwing over your existing user base to chase mythical people who aren't going to switch anyway is pretty darn dumb.

I don't consider myself to be mythical.

Don't feel bad -- Malor's argued pretty hard in the past that I don't exist, too.

Malor wrote:
You shouldn't rely on GNOME fallback mode at all though, it's deprecated and will be removed entirely soon.

Oh, of course it is. They made something that desktop users might like. Quick, kill it!

It's going away because it's made up of a whole bunch of mostly-unmaintained chunks of GNOME 2 code. Its official replacement, as of 3.8, is "Classic Mode", which delivers a more GNOME-2-like desktop layout within the GNOME 3 framework through the use of various extensions. It might be more like what you're after.

Or, you could just switch to something else -- I hear XFCE is a nice alternative if you want something more old-school. I was really enjoying the few weeks we had there without one of Malor's Rants About How GNOME 3 Is The Devil And Why All Its Developers Are Awful People Of Ill Breeding, so it'd be really, really nice if we could go back to that.

pneuman wrote:

Or, you could just switch to something else -- I hear XFCE is a nice alternative if you want something more old-school. I was really enjoying the few weeks we had there without one of Malor's Rants About How GNOME 3 Is The Devil And Why All Its Developers Are Awful People Of Ill Breeding, so it'd be really, really nice if we could go back to that.

As long as they keep being awful people of ill breeding, I will keep ranting.

Heading to the Gnome country soon from Unity-ville (Fedora from Ubuntu, if only for a visit). I may be mythical - we'll be finding out soon!

trueheart78 wrote:

Heading to the Gnome country soon from Unity-ville (Fedora from Ubuntu). I may be mythical - we'll be finding out soon! ;)

I've been thinking of trying out Fedora. Seems like a cool distro. Plus, I've found that yum is a bit more elegant, it lays out things nicely in the terminal, as opposed to apt-get

Malor wrote:
pneuman wrote:

Or, you could just switch to something else -- I hear XFCE is a nice alternative if you want something more old-school. I was really enjoying the few weeks we had there without one of Malor's Rants About How GNOME 3 Is The Devil And Why All Its Developers Are Awful People Of Ill Breeding, so it'd be really, really nice if we could go back to that.

As long as they keep being awful people of ill breeding, I will keep ranting.

*rolls eyes*

You know, if you wanted to, you could never, ever use GNOME again. Is there are reason that you don't just do that?

LXDE is also good. I actually like it more than XFCE.

You know, if you wanted to, you could never, ever use GNOME again. Is there are reason that you don't just do that?

Well, if I did that, I couldn't annoy you, which would impair my life quality.

Malor wrote:
You know, if you wanted to, you could never, ever use GNOME again. Is there are reason that you don't just do that?

Well, if I did that, I couldn't annoy you, which would impair my life quality.

I knew there was a reason!!

Edwin wrote:

LXDE is also good. I actually like it more than XFCE.

LXDE is indeed also good. It does fall short in multi-monitor support, though, which is what keeps it from being viable for me.

Ah, I only use a single monitor with it. I have my 2nd monitor on my windows laptop and use Synergy to link the two along with the laptop display.

I love Synergy!!!

Sorry, I just always try to promote that amazing piece of software.

Charles Stross tries Linux again. I've heard lots of good things about his Laundry series, and I really like the tone of his blog, so yay more stuff to try to read.

I currently feel confident enough to go on Ubuntu for my main PC. After 1 year iof usage with my laptop, and fixed by simple search a lot if my issues.

I think if going dual boot tho, Ubuntu being the main OS, but had some questions.

Since when I plugged in my iPhone, Ubuntu and the iDevice were fighting together. The iPhone was constantly refusing to pair with my PC. So, would an Android phone do the same? I want to move some movies, podcast and songs on a new phone.

And second question, since I'll dual boot, if I boot in Ubuntu, would I be able to use that other boot in a Vm setup? Or boot within the Linux box?

Android somewhat ironically uses a Microsoft favored protocol called MTP for file transfers. When I last looked into it Linux support was pretty raw. I use adb on the command line to transfer data via USB, but you can also use rsync or scp or cifs to connect to remote systems on a network from an android device. MTP support may have improved by now though.

And it's possible to pass through block devices from your dual boot system drive to virtual machines. I did this with virtual box for a time. I would say it's probably not worth it generally though since there are potential issues.

MTP is, shockingly enough, an open standard.

Hence, during the Zune years, Microsoft embrace-and-extended their own protocol to make MTP-Z, which was MTP but with an encrypted handshake that locked out connecting to non-MS software.

Fortunately, that died along with the Zune.

Fortunately, that died along with the Zune.

That was, in fact, the primary reason I didn't buy one.