* On 2012 11 Feb 18:18 -0600, Lisi wrote:
Why not KDE4?? Have you got a year or two?
After the release of KDE 4.8 a couple of weeks ago I installed Kubuntu 11.10 and then updated to 4.8 via the PPA. It's nice and just about won me over except that I prefer a number of GTK apps and if the GTK-Qt engine is used the GTK apps suffer from strange behavior such as the Page-Up/Page-Dn keys didn't work! Okay, I could go back to a native GTK theme and then I have the odd desktop look. The second strike is no sane Pulse Audio control program written in Qt so I had to install the latest PAvucontrol so I could get per app sink switching. The result was installing about half of GNOME!
Kubuntu will stay on the partition as it lets me connect to my phone via BlueTooth which I can't seem to get working in Debian.
Why not Gnome? Have you read the reviews of Gnome3??
I used GNOME 3 shell on my laptop running Wheezy and other than wonky session management, I had no real complaints. That is until I got impatient and updated it to Sid to get the 3.2.1 shell and then the fun began. It was actually less stable than the 3.0.1 version it replaced although I could install various extensions. Compared to Unity GNOME 3 Shell is sane and quite able to be controlled via the keyboard. I may revisit GNOME after 3.4 is released or a few versions down the road.
Still, the lack of a screensaver or even being able to integrate Xscreensaver and a few other niggles caused me to jump back to XFCE but it was acting quite strange as well. I finally just overwrote the partition with a new net install of Wheezy last week using the XFCE desktop task and things are quite stable. The previous installation had started life as LMDE about a year ago and even though I'd excised the Mint bits, it was never quite a pure Debian installation for some reason. I could go with Xubuntu but I prefer the more vanilla Debian for development.
Why have I not stuck with TDE? Probably why I did not stick with KDE4--GTK app integration and a few other niggles such as two Wicd icons appearing in the tray on every startup. Konqueror is old enough to have problems with some websites. I like a second browser in addition to Iceweasel/Firefox. Perhaps I just feel more comfortable at the near bleeding edge. ;-) My brother uses TDE on one of his desktops although I think for his use case XFCE is just as simple and lighter on resources.
For now XFCE is serving my needs well. I'm sticking with Debian. Neither MS nor Apple need apply! I keep tabs on this list just to see what direction the project is taking.
- Nate >>