Gentoo! Yay! Desktop environment?

[Essence_of_War]

After most of an evening of nonsense, amusing mistakes, and compiling, it now boots on its own to a CLI with no window manager.

It only took me literally overnight to figure out:

1) Why my 1TB disk was running out of space while trying to pull in linux kernel source.

OH LOL YOU NEVER ACTUALLY MOUNTED THE DISKS SO YOU WERE DESTROYING YOUR LIVE MEDIA THIS WHOLE TIME YAAAAAYYYYYY

2) Why I wasn't actually able to compile anything. Missed a "-" in your make.conf? GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.

Now I'm looking into desktop environments. I like what I've seen from Cinnamon, and I really like that it can work without systemd. Anyone have any good experiences with other environments that don't require systemd? I was also looking at MATE, xfce, lxde, and possibly plasma 5.

 

[lxskllr]

Is this a toy installation, or a serious work machine? If it's a toy, try somethimg different you haven't used before. If serious, pick something familiar. I like Xfce.

 

[Essence_of_War]

It's mostly a toy. It's a refurb thinkpad x201, with a handful of used/refurb upgrades so it's hardly a reliable workhorse machine.

I travel occasionally and I was mostly just hoping to be able to be able to run thunderbird, Gnu-octave (and probably qt-octave since octave 4.0 isn't stable for gentoo yet), and the ipython3/scipy3 stack on it so I could do email with a real keyboard and keep up with some of my computational work and side projects.

 

[lxskllr]

Enlightenment is fun and light. It's what a sleek modern desktop looked like in 2000 :^D

It has a lot of fiddly controls to get the desktop tweaked, and a distinctive, somewhat garish visual presentation. See Bodhi for a feel for what it looks like.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Personally I always find myself going back to KDE due to being able to customize more, and little things like being able to drag and drop open windows into other desktops, or the screen cap utility being better etc all add up for me. I don't really find it that much resource hungry, at least not on a modern machine. It's still faster than Windows.

Of course that's just what I like, so it's worth trying something new as well and decide for yourself. I'm not one of those "KDE rules Gnome sucks!" type people. Some people take it a bit too seriously.

 

[Essence_of_War]

quick follow-up!

One thing I REALLY like about Plasma 5 and Unity is the "Present Windows"/"OSX-like-expose" animations/effects.

I am having trouble figuring out if xfce or lxde support animations like that. Does anyone know off-hand if they do?

 

[lxskllr]

You could use the kwin window manager with the desk of your choice, and you should get the flashy effects.

 

[Essence_of_War]

So that would involve replacing xfwm4 (the default window manager for xfce) with kwin by getting the kwin packages, and then using the xfce session&startup tools to do "kwin --replace" at startup?

 

[lxskllr]

So that would involve replacing xfwm4 (the default window manager for xfce) with kwin by getting the kwin packages, and then using the xfce session&startup tools to do "kwin --replace" at startup?

Correct. Double check the package "kwin". That should be correct, but I have a vague recollection of them changing the name. Been awhile since I've fooled with it, and I don't use kde stuff for the most part.

 

[Essence_of_War]

I got the Xserver, and Xfce4 working! It looks nice, especially considering how few resources it seems to use. I'm using like 200 MB of RAM at the desktop.

I think I may need to re-compile and add a few other packages though, the guide for installing and configuring Xfce didn't mention consolkit, and I think that's necessary to do some useful things. Like hibernating, shutting down, and rebooting without opening a root terminal.

 

[Essence_of_War]

So the end of the exciting gentoo adventure is that I learned a lot about the number of kittens that are slaughtered mercilessly to for canonical, kde, et al to give us useful and aesthetically pleasing desktops.

I got xfce working the first time around, but I missed a couple key things in my kernel config for my re-attempt with zfs + LUKS, and at that point, my interest in watching the various parts of the DE and X re-compile themselves were waning. I used what I had learned about LUKS and LVM to install Kubuntu (now w/ Plasma 5!) and elementaryOS to logical volumes on a LUKS encrypted block device to play with some out-of-the-box pretty desktops.

They're both really nice, and they give cute splash screens at the disk unlock.