[Discuss] Interesting rant about Gnome 3

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 08:22:05AM -0500, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:49:16 -0500
> John Abreau <jabr at blu.org> wrote:
> 
> > The example that appears in my link was about "Transmission".
> 
> My quip about one button that doesn't do anything was supposed to be a
> joke, not prophecy. This Gnome BS is enough to make me want to dump
> modern desktops entirely and dig up my ancient TWM configuration files.

I would point to XFCE as the modern desktop successor to such
things... although one of my folks has an attachment to fvwm.

XFCE provides tools that work together well but are not mutually
interdependent:

a window manager with reasonable configurability and basic
compositing features if you like that sort of thing

a separate root window desktop manager that shows menus when you
click on it and icons for filesystems if you want that

a panel manager that is, again, reasonably configurable -- it
doesn't dictate particular layouts, it just enables them

a session manager to handle X startup and persistence

and a bunch of smaller applications to go along with that:
applets for the panels and a file manager and so forth.

The tabbed window titlebar can be easily arranged, too.

-dsr-