quote: Original post by Dauntless
I''d really like to try fluxbox, but for the life of me, I can''t figure out how to get it put in the menu option when GDM starts up. I suppose I can tinker with the xinitrc script, but I don''t want to hose anything.

I was having issues with getting kdm to recognize Gnome and Fluxbox as well. Then I found out about kdmupdate or something along those lines. Apparantly that was all that was needed.
As for getting GDM to see them, I haven''t used GDM but I imagine that it might edit the same/similar files?


Anyway, your desktop IS your personal preference. I am currently using KDE 2.1, but I installed Gnome and Fluxbox yesterday to try them out.
KDE is more integrated and complete, whereas Gnome is much nicer when it comes to choices...at least from what I heard. I believe that it is not its own Window Manager, so you would need to specify some Window Manager to be used with Gnome.
Fluxbox(which I haven''t used but I have seen), enlightenment (which I have used), and a number of "ugly" window managers are great for speed which means good for laptops.
My friend has a laptop and he runs fluxbox on it. None of the frills and such of KDE. Whether that is good or not is up to you.
But personally if you want a more MS Windows experience, KDE seems to be more like Explorer than Gnome is. Again, figure out what you want.

Ok, I''ve been looking at some window managers, such as Blackbox, Enlightenment, Window Maker, and FVWM. I have a question to ask though. All of the previous window managers are listed under window managers, where KDE and GNOME are listed under Desktops. Am I missing something here? What is the difference between the two?

What window manager do you like the best? Do you think I should just batch download them and try them? I tried to download KDE3.1 but there were like 1000 files to download. Do you know how I can get a window manager in Debian 3.0? Will apt-get work? Thanks.

A window manager manages windows. A desktop environment is more or less a whole experience (panels, desktop, file manager, et cetera).

quote: Original post by elendil67
Do you know how I can get a window manager in Debian 3.0? Will apt-get work? Thanks.

Assume apt-get can get everything for you. If it can''t, then try to get it independently. Like I''ve said, the less you install in Debian that doesn''t use dpkg, the better the chances are that you''ll never run into any problems with Debian.

Some of KDE 3.1 hit Sid (unstable) two days ago, the rest is on its way (it could be in right now, I haven''t checked). This is the first official KDE 3.x release for Debian, so it may be a little buggy (that''s why it''s in Sid, of course).

So I am assuming that Enlightenment/Blackbox/Fluxbox, a window manager, is like the basis for a desktop, such as GNOME? And then GNOME uses Enlightenment/Blackbox/Fluxbox as sort of the basis? I am really confused . Does anyone have a link to some sort of FAQ on this or anything? I think I might Google it. Thanks.

Ok I think I have figured out what they are. link. So I think I might try GNOME and Enlightenment or Fluxbox. Those I like.

Speaking of GNOME + Fluxbox... Has anyone gotten this to work with GNOME 2? I''d really like to use that instead of Metacity, but so far I haven''t really had any luck.

quote: Original post by CmndrM
Speaking of GNOME + Fluxbox... Has anyone gotten this to work with GNOME 2? I''d really like to use that instead of Metacity, but so far I haven''t really had any luck.

Yes. I did it on accident though . Debian''s Fluxbox description says it has Gnome support enabled, in case you haven''t done that.

You can set the current window manager by hand from the GConf dealie /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager, "current" and "default" are the two values to change in there.

I suppose I should explain my dillema a bit further. First of all, if I change those values in GConf, nothing actually happens, even after I restart GNOME. It still uses metacity. Of course, I can be 1337 and startup fluxbox by killing metacity and then starting fluxbox, but that just brings up another problem: The GNOME desktop becomes a window! Very, very odd...

I realize this is a discussion rooted in personal preference (no, I''m not opposed to the discussion and will not be closing it), but has anyone considered the programmer support and feature completeness of the toolkits/environments involved? KDE/Qt is pretty, has cool effects and tends to embrace bleeding edge features faster than GNOME. Gtk2[+]/GNOME, OTOH, has a more robust handling of many fundamentals - like far superior accessibility support, for which it even won an award from the American Blind Association - better X clipboard (though I believe that has now been addressed in KDE, especially since the Free Desktop Specification was published).

And as for why the discussion hardly tends to involve the other window mangers, well, (as has been alluded to) KDE and GNOME are desktop environments and can employ other window managers as part of their services.

Some really interesting questions are how can they evolve to improve user productivity (consider the ideas espoused by RISC OS, being implemented by the ROX Filer and desktop such as drag-and-drop open and save, etc), learnability and usability. I think that free software is a massive experimental opportunity for the software development and computing communities as a whole (you can leverage so much existing code to try new things), it shouldn''t be squandered.

• Drag and drop file saving and opening: One of ROX's claimed features. Unless I misunderstand what Oluseyi (and ROX? ) meant, Gnome and Nautilus already seem to support drag and drop file saving and opening of files (with Gnome 2.2 in Debian).
  
  If I take a screen shot ([Gnome-Foot or Action]->Screenshot), I can drag the image in the dialog to Nautilus and it will save as a PNG. I can then drag that image into the GIMP 1.3 and have it opened. Of course, I can drag the image from the dialog right to the GIMP, if I want, skipping Nautilus.
  
  
• Spring loaded folders: It's a nice feature, too bad Apple has a patent on it. I'm pretty sure ROX supports it anyway.
  
  I'd like to see Nautilus support it; many distro's ignore Apple's patents on virtually everything already (somewhat of an exageration ), one more can't hurt too much.
  
  Some applications implement this for dropping items into GUI trees already. I'm sure more parts of the GUI could be spring loaded to help with drag and drop.
  
  
• Basic file system hiding: I personally don't think the database-for-a-file-system idea is very good (although an effort is mostly done to implement as much in userspace for *nix). Giving most things that interact with the file system a multirooted tree or bookmarks is good enough in my opinion (but I could be wrong, I'm not an 'average' person ).
  
  This is debated a lot, but I don't know any of the more inventive ideas that are produced from such debates.
  
  
• Tab completion in file managers: Like in Bash or many other terminals. Nautilus kind-of supports this, but not the 'listing' when you hit tab twice. Another feature I'd really like, since it's the main reason I can navigate so quickly in Bash. GTK's file saving and opening dialogs support tab completion mostly. I don't know where else (besides file related tasks) it'd be useful.
  
  
• Seamless navigation in file managers (et cetera): Most file managers already support (or can support) navigation of the file system, network resources, web sites (to an certain extent), and archives (I don't know if Nautilus has seamless archive navigation yet ; but File Roller is really easy to use too, since it's very very well integrated with Gnome 2.x).
  
  All of the little missing things need to be made more uniform: writing to CD's with a decent implementation (Nautilus has this coming), looking at unburned ISO files (not sure if any file manager automates this, but it's easy enough at the command line), ... what else?
  
  
• Detachable GUI: Detachable menus is one of my favorite features of GTK+ and GTK 2.x. It is (or was?) turned off by default in GTK+ 2.x (for some unknown reason). I turned it back on, of course. Everything reasonable should be detachable , it works around the annoyance of repeatedly going through dialogs/menus/tabs/whatever.
  
  
• Alternatives or modifications to the common windowing system approach: While maybe not as much of a departure as something like Ion ("a tiling tabbed window manager"), multiple virtual screens or desktops solves most windowing system clutter problems very well. I thought this should be pointed out even though it's implemented everywhere in *nix-land.
  
  Other ideas will probably come up to challenge (rather than make tolerable) the "windowed desktop" standard, but I don't know if any will take over. Any new and exciting ideas I don't know about ?
  
  
• Pagers: Just an add-on to the last one. Most window managers or desktop environments support some sort of pager. Gnome 2.x and Enlightenment (among others) support intuitive dragging of windows from one virtual screen or desktop to another. Drag and drop seems to be an easy way to become pretty user friendly . I'm not sure how one would improve these more (or make something better?)?
  
  
• Task lists: There probably is something more efficient that listing windows. Grouping windows isn't much better (although it's nice as an option for when too many are on screen at once). Those options are common though. Metacity seems to hope to support an optional "by application (process)" mode someday, maybe that'd be better?
  

[edited by - Null and Void on February 10, 2003 7:09:51 AM]