[CS-FSLUG] Theory Exercise: Stable Desktop

[Ed Hurst]

First, thanks to all of you who contribute to the discussion.

Jon Glass wrote:

> Why the Gnome and KDE love here? Why not get a bit more daring.
> There's LXDE, but maybe it's not stable enough yet, but lower on the
> food chain, there's icewm. It's quite capable, though a bit reliant on
> text files for configuration, but you want stable, right?

I like IceWM just fine. It does bear some resemblance to the layout of 
that other OS. However, it doesn't use any part of the DBUS/HAL 
automount for removable media. If I could add something like Thunnar, 
which does take advantage of that service, it might be better.

There would have to be a GUI config system for any desktop/WM. There are 
some for IceWM, but I've had nothing but trouble from them in the past. 
We also need the standard collection of desktop utilities and so forth, 
and using something like IceWM means flexible choices. From experience, 
I'd say most folks aren't so completely concerned with interface 
consistency as you'd expect.

Everything we don't intend to do for these non-techy users still has to 
offer a GUI config utility, it has to work, and be stable. Nothing 
squirrelly in the least. Right now, I have a major complaint with too 
many old themes and not enough new ones. The old ones tend to crash 
things in my experience. What's completely missing is little applets for 
the bar at the bottom of the screen. I recall: biff, CPU, Net, and 
clock/calendar. Nowadays the GNOME-compliant version allows docking the 
likes of Pidgin on the toolbar, but I doubt I could get the Weather 
applet to work that way.

There has to be an app which will keep track of appointments with a 
notifier, working even if the application is closed -- meaning it has to 
run in the background. There has to be some drag-n-drop capability, 
though not as much as Mac uses.

There are pluses and minuses. Any other ideas?

-- 
Ed Hurst
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