http://www.osnews.com/story/11206/How_To_Make_Your_Linux_Desktop_Look_Awesome Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2010, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:44:40 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?3539 http://osnews.com/thread?3539 3ddesktop is pretty cool. I never used virtual desktops until i came across this tool. Believe it or not, it makes life a lot easier. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rm6990) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3541 http://osnews.com/thread?3541 3D desktop switcher, transparancy and gDesklets. No mention of GTK/QT themes, window manager themes, icon sets etc. That can all get horribly complicated, especially if you want a level of consitency. Neither gDesklets nor Karamba seem to want to work particularly well for me, not that I really want all that clutter. Nice to have transparancy explained (a bit) anyway. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Michael) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3544 http://osnews.com/thread?3544 My Linux Desktop is already awesome. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Budd) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3546 http://osnews.com/thread?3546 Read the summary, he's talking about stuff that could become popular in the future. I would hardly call theming and icon sets, which I used to use in Windows 3.1, revolutionary, nor anything from the future. Specifically, read the words in the link at the top of this page. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rm6990) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3547 http://osnews.com/thread?3547 After the 'ooo, ahhhh' of it, I found that it was more trouble than it was worth, so I got rid of it. I just use the drawer in GNOME to hold all my frequently used programs Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (youknowmewell) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3551 http://osnews.com/thread?3551 Still a bit tired. The starterbar is most closely associated with gDesklets, so that's why I wrote that [seemingly] disconnected sentence at the end. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (youknowmewell) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3559 http://osnews.com/thread?3559 Did anyone happen to catch a mirror before the site went nonresponsive?

PS: I have enlightenment 0.17 (CVS checkout) running today quite well, thank you... Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Roguelazer) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3581 http://osnews.com/thread?3581 yeah, looks like it's been osnews'ed

But still, I do have a couple of gdesklets around and I really like it. A little hard on the ressources, but eh, the cool factor outweights it Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (yanik) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3591 http://osnews.com/thread?3591 we will make your granny love GNU. =) Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (polaris20) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3605 http://osnews.com/thread?3605 Works like a charm. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3606 http://osnews.com/thread?3606 e17 here too on Gentoo. It's rough around the edges (my build is about 6 weeks old, so it may be less so today), but still very usable and just beautiful to stare at.

I can sort of see where this "desktop shell" thing is going and it absolutely ROCKS! I hope more developers start writing apps with these libraries as well. May even take a shot at it myself.

Thank you Rasterman, et al, for all your efforts. For me, e17 really hits the nail on the head. Minimal, usable, useful and beautiful. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3616 http://osnews.com/thread?3616 Indeed, e17 is already here in a reasonable form, and perfectly usable (http://get-e.org). I have a few problems now and then as new features are added to cvs then debugged later, but overall it works fine, and of course looks flash. All the girls I've showed it to were impressed as well. Everytime I get around to updating my working copy I find some cool new stuff to play with. It totally wastes all my free time (>_ Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (d a v i d) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3626 http://osnews.com/thread?3626 I'd rather have the most minimalistic GUI possible so that I can get some work done rather than ooh and ah about how pretty all the frivolous claptrap is. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (eMagius) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3638 http://osnews.com/thread?3638 I see that site has been OSed. Or is it OSNed. Oh well.. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3668 http://osnews.com/thread?3668 All these OS X eye candy articles miss the point completely: the thing where OS X is _way_ better than Linux is not eye candy. enlightenment had all that stuff years before OS X, caramelized, with extra sugar on top.
The great thing about OS X is _consistency_. I can press my favourite shortcut in _any_ OS X application, and it will work (well, provided the function makes sense :-) ). And, if it doesn't, that's not just "aw, shucks", it's a bug. Interestingly, that holds true even for the open source projects on OS X.
BTW, that's also why people loved BeOS: the programmers had a similar attitude there.

Well, to conclude, I really hope that projects like freedesktop.org continue to work hard at increasing consistency between the toolkits. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3680 http://osnews.com/thread?3680 "I'd rather have the most minimalistic GUI possible so that I can get some work done rather than ooh and ah about how pretty all the frivolous claptrap is."

That's great for you. WTF is the point of posting this in a thread about linux eye candy? To prove that you are uber-31337? To belittle people who *like* eyecandy? Why not embrace the fact that with Linux you absolutely have a choice? Or were you just trolling? Wed, 13 Jul 2005 17:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zombie process) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3684 http://osnews.com/thread?3684 Last I checked e17 required you to dig through confusingly large config files to modify it because they hadn't written any config utilities yet? Wed, 13 Jul 2005 17:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ma_d) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3688 http://osnews.com/thread?3688 man if all it takes is a little transparency to grind your productivity to a halt then you should get help. find out if you have ADD or something. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 17:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3698 http://osnews.com/thread?3698 People, the link is dead. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 17:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3711 http://osnews.com/thread?3711 uber-31337 sounds right.

People feel the need to comment in every story they have a thought on, even if it's trolling or not constructive at all.

It's like all the MS stories that anti-MS peopl feel the need to comment in, even if the story is about something GOOD MS is doing/did. Or the Opera stories Firefox fanboys comment on, or the other way around.

I REALLY wish there was a way to tag a rating, instead of just -1/+1. Like Off-topic, trolling, whatever. Kinda like Slashdot, but more simple. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 17:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sappyvcv) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3742 http://osnews.com/thread?3742 My Linux Desktop already looks awesome: http://www.realistanew.com/desktop.png Wed, 13 Jul 2005 18:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Amaranth) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3769 http://osnews.com/thread?3769 A while back, I was emailing some of the developers of uuu, http://www.unununium.org ,
an experimental non-OS. Some of them were pointing to the "feel" (as in "look and feel"), of the ion window manager, http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/ , as an example of good usability. Perhaps with all this talk about making your desktop "look awesome", we should also talk about making it "function awesome" as well. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 18:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3777 http://osnews.com/thread?3777 LC fan or just Cristina? Wed, 13 Jul 2005 18:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (orestes) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3821 http://osnews.com/thread?3821 i have problems to open the site Wed, 13 Jul 2005 19:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3856 http://osnews.com/thread?3856 Consistency between the toolkits? Well, then what's the point of having different toolkits? Aren't they SUPPOSED to be different to offer different things? Wed, 13 Jul 2005 21:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3859 http://osnews.com/thread?3859 actually pretty much everything is configurable through enlightenment_remote. It isn't the prettiest but it works well for now. Or you can use emblem to set the background (which maybe broken at the moment due to bg changes in e) or entangle to configure the menus... Wed, 13 Jul 2005 21:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3862 http://osnews.com/thread?3862 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201379376/ref=pd_sxp...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/humane/

Evolving an interface that's broken at its core is a no win situation. Please look at the book. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 21:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3884 http://osnews.com/thread?3884 OS X already looks sexy, is consistent, and is fun to use. The problem with Linux and its respective DEs is consistency and quality.

Linux desktops will always be playing catch-up with OS X and Windows. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 22:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Tom K) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3900 http://osnews.com/thread?3900 You have a good point here. But, unfortunatelly, since Jeff Raskin died his project has been dead. And I am not sure if he had a right vision how to kill WIMP interface. As far as I remember he wanted to go back to some kind of command line.

And I also know that Enlightment, transparency, 3D desktops, eyecandy are not the answers. They are just another variant of a bad GUI.

Paople are talking about MacOSX, but under the skin it is nothing new and revolutionary. It is just a more consistent and more beautiful bad GUI.

Cheers Wed, 13 Jul 2005 22:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3927 http://osnews.com/thread?3927 These things look good and I have tried desklets before, but I use a 19" LCD monitor and I can't even get the fonts to look nice - so I guess I would like to see that fixed before 3D desktops
I have tried every howto - fontification defuglying etc etc - but the desktop fonts just don't compare to windows, let alone what a mac produces. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 23:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3940 http://osnews.com/thread?3940 What's the point... just buy a Mac. The author of that article is just trying ot duplicate a Mac, and does it poorely. Wed, 13 Jul 2005 23:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3955 http://osnews.com/thread?3955 Well you know what not many of us do know where to look at all. and I've seen wonderful things done with fluxbox, openbox, wmaker and such so how about we all share our sources of where we get this stuff.

It Should be all centralized honestly nothing worse then spending a week trying to find the exact element you're looking for. Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3965 http://osnews.com/thread?3965 For those who don't know, enlightenment_remote is an ipc tool being built for e17. As anonmynous mentioned it's not pretty - all totally command line at the moment, but that's because it's still in development :-) There will be pretty configuration GUIs for all of this once the guts have been completed.

The only thing that has to be manually configured via file editing at the moment is files listing icons (like those that appear in the ibar), but maybe that also got a GUI config tool recently... It wasn't exactly computer science though, just a matter of inserting the icon filename into a ".order" file in a directory corresponding to the application. Definitely worth it to get a preview of e17! Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (d a v i d) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3971 http://osnews.com/thread?3971 > And I also know that Enlightment, transparency, 3D desktops, eyecandy are not the answers. They are just another variant of a bad GUI.

I don't think Enlightenment,transparency and eyecandy at least have anything to do with bad GUIs.

Enlightenment 17 doesn't dictate your interface to you.
You don't have to have lots of transparency.

Enlightenment's edje library will bring what is as far as I know unprecendented themability to window managers.
See http://www.enlightenment.org for more.
Although I understand that edge is not as mature as other parts of e17 yet - the version numbers for edje at http://enlightenment.freedesktop.org/ are still 0.5's Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (d a v i d) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?3996 http://osnews.com/thread?3996 "What's the point... just buy a Mac. The author of that article is just trying ot duplicate a Mac, and does it poorely."

If you really think that, you simply don't understand linux or people who use it. I'm typing this on my Powermac, running Panther so I'm no hater, but if my mac disappeared tomorrow, all I'd really miss is safari. For many people, Macs are a) stifling, and b) extremely overpriced. For many people, linux is just as useful as OS X, far less expensive, and far less restrictive. Thu, 14 Jul 2005 02:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zombie process) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4013 http://osnews.com/thread?4013 X11 sucks, Is an old protocol used 20 years ago, the Xorg implementation and the freedesktop programmers are slowly working on it, Longhorn already has a cool composite engine, OSX had for years, Again... Linux is still behind all, Well, nevermind. Thu, 14 Jul 2005 02:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4048 http://osnews.com/thread?4048 Great to see E17 is still holding its steam, I definitely can't wait to see it complete. I've been watching their CVS for a while, last month was pretty rough. The existance of get-e.org is totally cool, I will have to pulldown another snapshot. Thu, 14 Jul 2005 05:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4068 http://osnews.com/thread?4068 longhorn already has a composite engine ? are you retarded or what ? longhorn is not a product, longhorn is a future product. longhorn is vapourware. the betas going around have not got composite engines in them, the only compositing was seen in a VIDEO microsoft released.

Linux has xcompmgr and composite extensions right NOW, in fact, my version of kde 3.4 has had xcompmgr running on it since I installed it months ago, and this is a release version, not a demo, not a beta version, and most definately, NOT vapourware Thu, 14 Jul 2005 07:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (raver31) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4093 http://osnews.com/thread?4093 I'm currently using Gnome.

If I switch to E-17, can I still develop with Mono? Thu, 14 Jul 2005 08:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4104 http://osnews.com/thread?4104 Sure, there are even bindings being made for EFL (enlightenment foundation libraries, all the libs together) in C#.

Though you might want to run gnome-settings-daemon to give you your GTK theme =) (sry, i dontk now another way). Thu, 14 Jul 2005 08:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4177 http://osnews.com/thread?4177 'I don't think Enlightenment,transparency and eyecandy at least have anything to do with bad GUIs.'

Yes, it has. Read some Jeff Ruskin stuff, please.

'Enlightenment 17 doesn't dictate your interface to you.'

Yes, it does. It is still a window manager and/or desktop. I don't want window managers, and I don't want desktops. I don't want WIMP interface, and Enlightenment is just one of these. Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4182 http://osnews.com/thread?4182 I didn't realize people needed a giant clock on their desktop to be productive. Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4205 http://osnews.com/thread?4205 Ah, yes, good old Jeff Ruskin. Wait...who the fsck is Jeff Ruskin? If you're going to pretend to care about a dead man's life-work, please at least have the courtesy to spell his name right. Thu, 14 Jul 2005 13:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zombie process) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4284 http://osnews.com/thread?4284 There are already tools to edit eap files and have been for a long time. e_utils_eapp_edit can create/edit the eap files and entangle can be used to create the menus with them. Thu, 14 Jul 2005 14:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4381 http://osnews.com/thread?4381 > Consistency between the toolkits? Well, then what's the point of having different toolkits? Aren't
> they SUPPOSED to be different to offer different things?

Let me try to explain this through an analogy...

In an ideal world, we would all speak the same language. This was the goal of Esperanto and is even a tenet of the Bahai faith.

However, different people have different languages and there is no way they will relinquish them; they're a part of the identity. Likewise, certain users like apps with a given toolkit for various reasons, and developers like developing on a given framework for various reasons. Hence the need for interoperability.

I might be a Dioula from the Ivory Coast. I speak Bambara. Let's say I have a friend who is a Baoule, and prefers to speak his native Baoule. But we both speak French. By sharing in common certain features, toolkits can interoperate comfortably while retaining their unique characteristics (and therefore remaining desirable to the users who favour them).

IceWM supports the little tray applet for Rhythmbox (because of a new common protocol) now because of these efforts. I could not imagine this happening years ago.

--
La guerre rend les hommes si betes
Plus betes que les betes
Les missiles sont munis de tetes
Humanite court a sa pert Thu, 14 Jul 2005 17:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?4651 http://osnews.com/thread?4651 Cool down, zombie. Jef Raskin , ok? You get it now? I am neither american or englishman, so misspelling (oh, do you say misspelling?) is something that happens to me all the time.

I didn't write Jef Raskin name correctly and your conclusion is that:

1) I 'pretend to care about his work'

2) I don't have 'the courtesy to spell his name right'

Really? You brain-damaged, arrogant little prick. Spelled correctly this time? Fri, 15 Jul 2005 03:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?5074 http://osnews.com/thread?5074 I believe Aza, Jef's son is still contributing with around 9 other developers that were working on it previously with Jef. Aza himself is a very intelligent person and probably learned quite a bit from his father about the goals of the project. The project page just isn't being updated anymore with the changing specs & news for the public to see. The project is probably going at a slower pace with Jef gone but that's to be expected. He projected before his death 18 months for a 1.0 release. I don't know how much timing has changed now? Sat, 16 Jul 2005 11:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments