Re: [gentoo-user] why you've chosen your desktop environment? (no war !)

[Mick]

On Sunday 17 Aug 2014 15:56:05 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 17/08/2014 15:28, Rich Freeman wrote:

> > 6.  That dolphin mode that gives you a shell that follows the pwd.
> > That is just nifty.
>
> #6 - it does? How do I activate that? Might be useful, I didn't even
> know there was such a fature

I use Konqueror (with the dolphin plugin) and F4 opens konsole in a separate 
window, or Settings/Show Terminal Emulator shows a terminal in the bottom 5th 
of Konqueror.  My Dolphin doesn't offer the same, probably because I have only 
installed selected apps and a few meta packages, not the whole enchilada.


> > Things I dislike:
> > 1.  I disable nepomuk and its offspring.
>
> nepomuk (and akanodi) and a bit of a personal embarrassment for me. In
> the beginning I advocated they were a good idea; and I still believe the
> idea is good for the average desktop in this brave new world. But the
> implementation - that often outweighs the idea. Nepomuk not so much
> (that one is pretty efficient) but definitely akonadi (that one sucks eggs)

They are a good idea if you want to be able to index and search the whole of 
your PC for anything metatagged with "foo" and don't value the cost of 
electricity.  The chances of me wanting to do this on my personal laptop are 
exceedingly rare, although once dementia sets in it could prove useful.  :p

For me this plus the shift from KDEPIM 3 to 4 was criminal destruction of 
value.  I live in hope that one day KDE will take a hard long look at itself 
and go back to KDE 3 architecture;  or that nepomuk, akonadi, redland, mysql 
and what-ever-else they have added can be switched off selectively without 
breaking the ability to search your address book and send an email;  or that 
all this additional functionality will be so wonderfully streamlined that I 
will never ever know it is there.  Given it's been 4 or 5 years now since this 
disaster happened I am not holding my breath.  :-(


> > Things I think might be improveable:
> > 1.  The way it handles window grouping.  I dislike a bazillion tabs,
> > but I don't like the way it does grouping all that much either.  Maybe
> > I need to better grok activities/etc.
>
> Heh heh:-) I have that problem too. I forced myself to close tabs
> ruthlessly and rely on history. I now try and keep open only tabs I am
> using, not also tabs I might use again.
>
> Activities looks like a good idea, but I can't get them to work and feel
> right. Perhaps I should define what my activities actually mean to me
> better, this is far from simple.

I was meant to look into activities, so that I can explain it to some KDE 
users who also don't know what this is.  I vaguely recall understanding the 
concept in the past, but never tried it out.  Can you please explain in simple 
terms what it is and how it is meant to be used?


> For pure engineering excellence it's hard to beat e19 and efl. However,
> raster and his team still have no qualms with ripping chunks of good out
> and replacing them on a whim, so perhaps not the most stable environment
> out there :-)

If you stay with testing versions already in portage, things are not as bad.  
I'm on enlightenment-0.17/0.18.8 and efl-1.9.5 and it's been quite stable.  
Last time I tried to emerge efl-1.10.1 it failed, so I am waiting for 
maintainers to catch up with the latest before I try again.

BTW, since enlightenment trunk moved to git, I am not sure my enlightenment 
overlay syncs properly, because it doesn't bring up any message to inform me 
which packages have changed.  Should I change something in layman to increase 
verbosity of git sync's?
-- 
Regards,
Mick