Crashed Pips - Computers, politics, emetic trash

GNOME is, as I have said before, my desktop environment of choice on most computers. This is partly because of its simplicity and elegance, and partly because… well… I hate KDE. And I am referencing this previous article because in the article I said that the three major choices were to “use GNOME, KDE, or cobble something together out of the other major window managers and desktop environments”. I owe an apology here to Xfce, which I failed to mention in this article.

My Xfce4 desktop, with Xfce terminal open.

My relationship with Xfce (not XFCE - this acronym came from “XForms common environment”, which is invalid as XForms is no longer used) has been somewhat love/hate. I always liked the fact that Xfce was GNOME-like in its implementation but yet lightweight, but I was irritated by its lack of polish and the fact that most of my time was spent at the command line, configuring.

However, I recently decided I should give another desktop environment a try on my Eee PC. I tried KDE4 - it was a disaster, nothing less. It was slow, chunky, and uuu-gly.

Mysteriously, even after purging all the KDE packages and running  apt-get clean, I was left with less disk space than before. ~100mB may not seem like much for someone using a massive HDD with 300-odd gigabytes of space - but to me, with my Eee’s puny 4G hard drive, it is important to conserve as much space as possible.

Naturally, after this, I tried Xfce. It’s very similar to GNOME in appearance and function, and comes with the lovely Thunar file management program. Mousepad, its text editor, is also very nice, and it’s also GTK+ 2.0 based, meaning the apps I use on GNOME look very similar on Xfce.

I still have some problems with Xfce: its typing breaks application doesn’t take into account idle periods, and I don’t like the fact that it’s difficult to enable compiz. However, I can get around these: Xfce has improved quite a bit since I last used it on eeeXubuntu, and I rather like the elements of the desktop I’ve configured:

• The wallpaper is Sydney Harbour Bridge WP from here on Deviantart.
• The xfwm and GTK themes are Next - I can’t find a link for these, they’re probably floating around on freshmeat somewhere.
• The font is FreeSans at a 9pt font size.
• The icon set is GNOME 2 - the file manager-related icons were actually drawn by Susan Kare, the lady responsible for the Macintosh icons (pre-OS X). Her design philosophy renders icons as more like road signs than illustrations, and they are quietly beautiful in the environment.
• The panel currently has a menu, a window picker, a hard disk and sound monitor, a typing break monitor, a workspace pager, a system tray and a clock.