Re: [gentoo-user] How many people use KDE?

[Toby 'qubit' Cubitt]

On Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 12:56:47AM +0100, Hemmann, Volker Armin wrote:
> On Saturday 21 January 2006 00:44, Alan E. Davis wrote:
> > May I ask others' experiences with e17?  I just wasted my holiday
> > installing e17 on two of three machines.  It is smaller than Kde, but
> > background is 20% of cpu .  Buggy.  Beautiful.  A PITA to configure,
> > and menus suck. I don't think I'll be there long.   I liked
> > enlightenment .16 except I guess I really do need icons to remind me
> > of what I've got on the system, and good menus.
>
> that was exactly how I felt. All the problems to get it installed, and than it
> was such a bad thing to configure&use, that I deinstalled it some days later.
> I used earlier enlightenment incarnations as my main desktop for some time,
> back, when KDE 2.X was dead slow, but when KDE 3 came out, enlightenment lost
> its appeal.

That's a bit unfair on e17, given that it's still pre-release
software. It is indeed buggy at the moment (though I should add I
haven't had any problems with more recent CVS installations), but
that's to be expected in a pre-release, and you're warned about it in
big red letters when you emerge it.

It is also a PITA to configure at the moment, but graphical menu
managers, keybinding editors, icon creaters, desktop icons, etc. are
planned before the release version, and every CVS checkout seems to
add more graphical configuration options at the moment, and reduce the
number of times I resort to the enlightenment-remote shell command.

Finally, on my ancient Pentium2 450, it uses 2-3% of cpu. In fact, I
find it more responsive than e16. So I'm not sure where the 20% comes
from. Maybe you've enabled lots of the processor intensive eye-candy,
like animated backgrounds or the snow or flames modules? Or you just
need to update to a more recent CVS release.

Without wishing to start a flame war, it's unfair to the developers to
give the impression that their software doesn't work very well without
at least mentioning it's pre-release (and therefore not expected
to!). And really, criticising it at all for being buggy and lacking
features is a little unfair. If you're not prepared to put up with
some rough edges, wait for the official release version.


Just to put in a good word for e17 to balance the discussion...

Personally, I prefer enlightenment to KDE or gnome because I don't
like the whole integrated desktop approach. I prefer my window manager
to manage windows, and leave me free to run whichever apps I like. My
ideal window manager has nothing at all on the desktop (except maybe a
wallpaper to gaze at when nothing's running), no gizmos taking up
desktop real-estate, an easy way to run my most frequently used apps
and some way to get at any others I might need occasionally, some way
to navigate between running apps, and as much as possible of this
should be manageable from the keyboard (with completely configurable
keybindings). If it does all this and looks beautiful at the same
time, so much the better!

I find that, of the traditional window managers, enlightenment comes
closest to this ideal (though I admit I've never tried FLuxbox or
IceWM - I stopped looking when I found I was happy with
enlightenment). Since a lot of e17 features are written as modules, I
can choose not to load (or often not to install) them, so only those
features I want take up disc space and memory (it's the gentoo
way!). For instance, I don't bother loading e17's "start menu".
(what's the point when I have ibar and keybindings to run the apps I
use most, and the run dialogue for the rest?). But it's there for
those who want it. E17 has completely configurable keybindings, even
if they're a pain to configure at the moment, and the
"enlightenment-remote" command line...err...command is fantastic for
getting shell scripts to interact with the window manager.

If you've read all that, you'll not be surprised I also like ratpoison
;-) But I haven't used it long enough to get used to it yet. And I've
not got beyond installing ion yet.

Window managers are very much a personal choice, and there is no
"right" decision, except try out a few and decide for yourself. Which
means it's worth at least being aware that there are plenty of other
choices apart from KDE and gnome, if you're not happy with them
(unlike a certain other OS, where there's not even a single
alternative ;)


Toby
-- 
PhD Student
Quantum Information Theory group
Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics
Garching, Germany

email: toby@××××××××.org
web: www.dr-qubit.org
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