Linux, what are our objectives?

[lug-TwWeWiF2EGRi+ztankeudA at public.gmane.org (Don Levey)]

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Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 10:28:50AM -0500, Don Levey wrote:
>>> I do away with all desktop icons completely on my machines.
>>> Desktop real-estate is at a premium (he says, looking at a
>>> 1680x1050 display next to a 2048x1536 display) and not to be
>>> wasted on application launchers.
>>>
>> Please forgive the ignorance, but what then do you put on your desktop
>> real estate?  I keep a monitor (gkrellm) on there, but apart from
>> application launchers that's about it.
> 
> There's a pretty wallpaper. I see it rarely.
> 
> I have two panels; it's set to autohide along the left edge of my
> left monitor and on the right edge of my right monitor. That
> supplies my common-program-launching and basic monitoring needs
> (clock, calculator, volume control, load/RAM/swap).
> 
> I have seven virtual screens. I rarely need fewer than that; I
> can't really keep track of more than that. 
> 

Ah, so it's not that you'd be using the actual desktop real estate for
some other task/monitor/display, but that it would be covered so often
that desktop icons wouldn't be useful at all.

On the other hand, I *do* iconify, and I don't tend to keep open
anything that I don't need in the near future.  But then, I'm dealing
with a slower machine at the moment, and both my wife and I are running
simultaneous sessions and we switch back and forth (and will continue to
do so until we can afford to fix her laptop).  Performance is negatively
impacted if I keep a lot of things open.

I may have 2-3 terminal emulators open at a time, one per remote
machine, and tabbed for multi-sessions on that machine.  I keep open
Firefox (with about a dozen tabs), Thunderbird (which is starting to be
a HUGE memory hog) checking mail for 8 different accounts and 5
calendars (via Lightning).  Then it's whatever main task I'm running at
the moment, and probably a game like FreeCol.

My work machine is not (yet) Linux, though I can hope, so my work-day
tasks aren't really a part of the discussion.

 -Don
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