Saturday, April 22, 2006
New Environment
So I got back to London on Sunday, K-Li came over and we were hanging out in my room on IRC, she on my PC and me on my laptop, and she was having trouble with my user interface. I've used Fluxbox for the last 3 years, and I've always loved it, Gnome and KDE just seemed slow and nasty in comparrison, with their big nasty menus, it was too windows-like (I know a lot of Gnome fans will scream at me for saying that, but the big centralised menu is windows-like) and I liked my comand-line stuff. That said, I try to promote linux whenever I can, and if people coming to my house are getting fluxbox as their first linux experience maybe that wasn't great... Besides, I could do with a change.
Enter: Xfce, sort of like Gnome but stripped down with a right-click-on-the-desktop-style-menu (the way I like it), but with a much frendlier task bar and a little panel thing and everything. I played around with it a lot, making the menu have /only/ what I want in it (I hate big menus full of useless crap :P) and moving the task bar to the bottom and the panel to the right (on autohide) to make it as fluxbox-like as possible really... But it does seem much nicer and user friendly. The rounded windows for everything are really cool :)
Here, have a screenshot of my current setup while i write this :)
Other new things you may notice from the screen shot... SCIM is a much better input method for writing Japanese, my old one sucked so badly, in GTK programs (Gaim, X-Chat, Firefox etc) it would automatically start in Japanese >.< This new one is great, perfect in almost every way, except it makes Opera crash. I have no idea why. Hopefully it'll be fixed in a newer version of either Opera or SCIM. And yeah, that's the "other" new thing, Firefox is in my icons on my panel, which is unusual for me because usually I'm an Opera zealot :P
Uh, not much else to rant about... Exams start Monday (April 24th) and continue until May 12th... Wish me luck, I'm gonna need it! XD
-- Kaoru
8 Comments:
Yuck confusing-ness
It is a very geek-think to use i think though, so i will let you off XD
personally though im sticking with windows!
GOOD LUCK IN EXAMS!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
By k-li, at 8:44 PM, April 22, 2006
i couldn't get use to a desktop like that... where's the date and time?! XD
good luck in your exams too!!!
*big hug*
By izumi, at 11:51 PM, April 22, 2006
k-li: lol... the whole point is to make you consider it not a geek thing... *sigh* stupid windows... :P
izumi: the time's on the right at the bottom of the panel ^^;; And yeah I'll admit I sometimes wish it were on the taskbar, Xfce needs a more customisable taskbar -_-;
both of you: thanks for the luck~ ^_^ last night I dreamt that I failed Architecture T_T *huggles you both*
By Kaoru, at 9:19 AM, April 23, 2006
Mih...we're too used to windows and qwerty keyboards instead of linux and dvorak therefore we cannot be bothered liking this "better" option of computers XD
By •°¤*(¯`°ƒåήğזє°´¯)*¤°•, at 4:14 AM, April 25, 2006
Great to hear you're giving Xfce a try. It's a great environment, and I knew it'd be a nice transition from fluxbox.
But to be honest, you can do the same things you've done with Xfce, in GNOME.
GNOME is far more flexible, especially the gnome-panel. The only thing you'd tweak would be the window manager, which is the cool part: you'd use OpenBox and get a FluxBox like Window manager, with GNOME compatibility out of the box!
Try it. GNOME/OpenBox is damn cool. It's what I used before I fully just switched to GNOME. Make sure you emerge gnome-light or whatever, so you won't be compiling that extra GNOME crap you probably won't like anyways. :P
P.S. Good luck on your exams! :D:D:D
By Lance, at 4:54 AM, April 25, 2006
Fangie: Dvorak? lol, that was random XD
Lance: emailed you a response, because I felt like ranting :)
By Kaoru, at 9:22 AM, April 25, 2006
Just found this post.
Interesting stuff.
I'd say good luck in your exams, but it's a bit late now, and I've already said it. I suppose I can say good luck for the remainder!
Also, sidenote, have you pinned down a windowing system that does transparancy properly yet?
By Adam, at 8:51 AM, April 29, 2006
The only true transparency in Open Source Software (afaik) is the XGL project, which aims to update X Windows (ie. It will work with all window managers) to do all sorts of really amazing things like transparency... It's in extreme Alpha "Do not install this it will go wrong" stages at the moment, but there is a very very nice Live CD called Kororaa (available at http://kororaa.org/) which really nicely shows off some of the stuff we're gonna get in the future :)
Good luck with your exams too :)
By Kaoru, at 10:15 AM, April 29, 2006
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