Comparitive Desktop Environments

[Ranjan Maitra]

> 
> Ok, I tried XFCE. I find it far superior to LXDE. You can find things in
> a reasonable fashion. It shares with LXDE the problem of not being able
> to change the backgrounds. I think people who balk at Gnome 3 would find
> it easy to use. Adding things to the panel are much easier than with
> LXDE. I am a little confused with Mixer as Volume control but such is
> life.

I agree with this above assessment, even though I am currently an LXDE
user.

LXDE, however, satisfies my requirements, and I don't mind having to
find stuff, or programming it through configuration files. It appears
to be more of a cross between a full-blown DE and a WM-environment. (I
am a late migrant from fvwm through XFCE to LXDE.) Of some concern is
the fact that one of the LXDE components (lxpanel) is currently
unmaintained.

There have been quite a bit of discussion on the web on the pluses and
the minuses of Gnome3. I have not used it, and do not intend to. I used
fvwm for a long time (from 1998 to 2007) when I gave up on it, and
moved to XFCE which I used for another couple of years until LXDE came
around. (On the way from fvwm to XFCE, I spent time on Gnome2 -- or
whatever it was in 2009 -- for one day, and promptly gave it up because
I did not feel it added to much for me.)

I have fond feelings for fvwm, however I moved simply because many of
the applications in Fedora would increasingly have needless (some
still do) gnome dependencies. (I think they have done a better job
cleaning it up some.) In fact, to me, the real discussion should
be not on the pluses and minuses of Gnome2 vs 3, but whether the base
distribution should be so tied in so deeply to something so radical.
(Note that libnotify does not work in F15 as a result to changes in the
base package, or so I have been led to believe. Yes, there is a
workaround, install xfce4-notifyd, but this is some strange solution if
you do not want a XFCE spin.) I happen to believe not, but maybe there
can be other views of this.

Of greater appeal to some, including me, would be if there could be a
Fedora spin using a non-desktop environment such as fvwm (or something
similar). That would be quite beneficial to at least some of us users
welded to the past...:-)

Many thanks and best wishes,
Ranjan