I’ve recently had it with Ubuntu’s Unity.
Wait, why Unity?
Because my gdm was consuming so much CPU my laptop had its fan working non-stop. I’ve researched and tweaked and installed and removed – and finally moved to Unity to solve that. There may have been another solution, but that’s an old story now.
Thing is, that used to be Gnome 2, a great environment for a software developer. Easy keystrokes to move between your apps, intuitive mouse gestures. Unity presented with a very slick look, but a counter-productive environment. Perhaps it’s great for people opening one Firefox window and one Libre Office Writer document. It does not work as well for people with 3 different browsers, 5 terminals on 2 different desktops, eclipse with 4 separate perspectives, and Gimp, which opens up with 5 windows up front.
Unity does not handle these well at all. To invoke a new Firefox window you can’t just click on the launcher: that would just open up one of your already open windows (and the wrong one, by the way). You either have to work your way through the specific application you work with (Ctrl+N for new window), or create a special keyboard shortcut for your favorite app (e.g. Alt+Ctrl+T for new terminal, thankfully pre-defined). And, ARGGGH! So unintuitive at times! The “Show Desktop” seems to hide all windows except the very one which happens to be maximized and focused at the time (wasn’t that window the reason to show the desktop in the first place?). OK, this post is not about Unity.
The trouble is: Gnome 3 seems to be no better in some respects. Now I confess I did not spend a lot of time with it. I just did not have the patience to go through the whole deal again. But I do have people around me using it, and I get to hear their occasional ARGGGH! Comparing notes, I don’t see that it’s a better developer’s environment.
Back to Gnome 2? Not if you’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10, you can’t. And, besides, no going back in Gnome.
Back to KDE? I was an avid KDE user for years, but the premature 4.0 version made me run away. Yes, I suppose it’s possible now, but I first tried Xfce.
Wow, last time I looked at Xfce it was really lightweight, with all that implies: it used to be so poor, so minimal. Today, with the very slick work from Xubuntu, it is fairly feature rich, while remaining fairly simple. In fact, it now more resembles Gnome (I mean Gnome 2, the real Gnome) than Gnome itself.
Easy enough to customize the panels. Familiar window buttons, with no funny grouping. The ordering of window buttons alphabetically is weird, to say the least; I’m missing the option of reordering it manually (why should Thunderbird always be the last one? I want it first!). But otherwise very clear an obvious; no funny behavior.
A few days of test drive with plenty of consoles, eclipse windows, firefox windows, and I can say its easy to work with. That’s all I’m asking for: an easy to work with environment!
To my surprise, the volume and brightness keys on my ThinkPad work great w/ XFCE, so some tweaking will probably be required.
There are definitely a few big things missing from XFCE, but they will be there in time. For me, the biggest missing piece is the ability to easily configure multiple/external displays with a gui app. I know for a fact that this is in the works, based off of screenshots from one of the XFCE developers. Keyboard shortcut fixes should be close as well.
I originally ran XFCE on Debian 6, but I couldn’t deal with v4.6. There is a huge difference, especially in usability, between v4.6 and v4.8. Debian backports still doesn’t have v4.8, so I gave up on Stable. As much as I hate it, I ended up going with Ubuntu, due to the rapid release of updates and fixes. I started with Ubuntu’s command line install option, then ran the following to get a nice minimal XFCE installation with X:
apt-get install xorg xfce4 xfce4-goodies synaptic wicd-gtk wicd-curses
That right there will get you a nice minimal XFCE system with great wireless support from wicd. If you absolutely must have a graphical login, check out Slim.
Agree that both Gnome3 and Unity went into wrong direction.
XFCE is great, but I faced some annoying issues using it on two external screens (which is my day to day work environment).
I use Fedora 15 and here is where I found help to keep using Gnome2: http://k3rnel.net/tag/bluebubble/
They have back-ported Gnome2, all you have to do is remove Gnome3 and use their repository.
If you do a minimal Ubuntu install, you can put whatever desktop you want on it after you install X and ALSA. For example, you wanna install Fluxbox with no login manager, Thunar as the file manager, Dillo as the browser, and no Synaptic for the basic configuration, you can do that.
@Jonas: You can use a straight-up WM as a desktop too, my fave WM’s being Openbox+Tint2+Conky (or the stock Crunchbang desktop configuration), and Fluxbox.