[svlug] I hate Ubuntu Unity. I am soliciting suggestions.

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On 05/09/2016 11:59 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo (mail at webthatworks.it):
>
>> That's nice but I felt the codebase was too young and the userbase too
>> small.

> This was the case with both parent projects, and even more so with
> Razor-qt, so combining forces made a great deal of sense.  Also, LXDE is

That's why I wish them good luck.

> not the first project to try gtk and find it and its surrounding
> software ecosystem too much of a mess to stick with.  Qt is just a whole
> lot cleaner -- a difference that's not surprising when you realise that
> gtk was created by ripping the graphics engine out of The GIMP and
> adapting it.

qt are great libraries but KDE has always been too much experimental and 
tried to bee too "cool" and did enjoy a too few short period of 
stability to build up a reputation.
Still it is surprising how they get faster at regaining stability each 
time they reboot from a new main version.

>> Furthermore I just noticed the support in debian got improved.
>> It seems I may try it sooner than later.

> LXDE's had solid Debian support, IMO, for a good long while.

> LXQt's in Debian 9 'Stretch' (current Testing branch), but hasn't yet
> percolated down to Debian-stable.  However, you can get it from
> Siduction's jessie-backports repo:  https://wiki.debian.org/LXQt

Last time I checked there were too few pieces of lxqt in sid. Now it 
comes with the latest release. Unfortunately lxqt doesn't seem to follow 
the "release early, release often" mantra. My few information aren't 
enough to conclude lxqt is a strong project in debian.
I should have checked what has been the delay between the release of the 
last version of lxqt and its inclusion in sid.

> Personally, I find that _no_ DE at all is a lot less hassle.  What does
> a DE buy me that I cannot enjoy by installing best-of-breed applications
> irrespective of not-especially-relevant DE religion?  Mostly a
> 'graphical file manager', but even those can be picked a la carte if I
> suddenly forget how to use bash.

I haven't seen any useful desktop innovation in years.
This is giving time to light desktop to add some useful feature and 
shiny, full featured desktop to get more efficient and delegate stuff 
that shouldn't be managed by the desktop.

Last time I ran KDE I found it pretty fast, sometimes faster than xfce.
Furthermore there are far more chances that KDE will run on wayland 
earlier than xfce.

I think there is a lot of space to improve people's life with 
integration. Unfortunately integration done wrong turn out to be bloat, 
loss of modularity and lock-in.
Doing it right is not easy and requires time.

> To me, a DE looks like a bundle of a bicycle, a kayak, and lawnmower
> sold as a 'kayakcyclemower', when I'd prefer to buy a bicycle today and
> consider choice of other things on some later occasion, a la carte.
> Never saw the attraction of throwing together a codebase marching band
> and calling it a separate thing.  Except of course that it's easier than
> thinking, which always appeals.

Sticking things together and configuring them is a very boring way to 
use time. There are skills and tools that are marginal to your work but 
that you still need. I want my brain free of ancillary dependencies as 
much as possible but still ready for "disaster recovery mode".
I don't want to be in a position where my productivity is heavily 
influenced by careful setup of accessory tools.

I prefer to use things that mostly work by default if they are not what 
makes me competitive in my work.
For me a kayakcyclemower may make sense.

There aren't too many things a DE have to do but enough that I feel pain 
every time I have to set them up or "assemble" them and a DE is 
definitively not what makes me competitive on my work.

If I had the feeling KDE was enough stable I'd be happy to "tollerate" 
the bloat of akonadi/nepomuk to gain a higher level of integration 
without having to resort to tweaking stuff.

There are tools where I feel more friction, where I have to actively 
search for compromises or I can't reach compromises. A DE is not one of 
those.
Once upon a time I was more sensible to DE automatism to get a bit more 
dependent and have stronger preferences.

While it is hard to believe, now KDE can be as fast or even faster than 
xfce4, offering many nice visual effects and the memory and CPU toll are 
nearly indistinguishable.

Unfortunately I still feel the whole akonadi/nepomuk/mysql[*] stuff is 
over-engineered and I think it is still to early to find a stable 
release to waste time on moving to KDE again.

[*] now it should be possible to use sqlite

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it