Ugly? Featureless?

My reply...

XFCE can be made to look the way you want it. It lets you "tune" it...something I did'nt get to do in Gnome...

Maybe I'm having a bad day but I don't understand that what does "stick it to the man" mean?

featureless = minimal = elegant = beautiful ?

I've been reading the XFCE dev mailing list (didn't understand half of it) but it looks as if a lot more features are coming ... poor Linus!

@ catkin

I'm okay with features if you have a choice to use them or not. But what Gnome3 turned into is not a set of features, it's a whole different direction. I dont think I'm the only one "getting of the bus"...

It's progressive to explore new paradigms (thanks to Paulo Alto for WIMP) but, for most of us, they have to be productive. I haven't seen Gnome 3 but get the impression it fails on that count and fundamentally, not just a question of getting used to it.

Gnome2 had compiz support. A bookmarks menu. Support for network shares in the file browser. Gnome-Do doesnt work in XFCE.

Not that this makes XFCE completely featureless. Its a nice WM for lower end PCs.

I sort of relate this whole thing to the iPHONE.

Digression:
I think everyone will agree that the iPhone was a step in the right direction. But the very first thing they did was remove a functionality that had *always* existed -- the ability to remove ALL text messages at once,.. They removed that ability and Steve Jobs has spent the last 5 years saying "Why would anybody need that?" Because he has never been a sysadmin and received 800 text messages through the vtext email system that sends each one from a different address, and so has never needed to clean out his text messages *ONE AT AN F'N TIME*

Gnome3 similarly removed things that we just sort of took as "required."

...what do you think this is?

It's all I could afford and reducing the "Grand Landfill" one PC at a time...

But this is one of the main reasons I went into Linux, it lets you do things with a lower end PC...the "other thing" keeps on upping the stakes until you basically need a supercomputer just to surf the web...

Wow. That thing IS a supercomputer!

I use SL6 on my personal laptop at home, its a low-grade compaq and works fine with Gnome2. But it could never run this new Gnome3 or KDE or anything of the like.

But really, these days, getting a decently spec'd computer for cheap is not that difficult. I saw an ad for one of those rent to buy places renting out a computer for 8$ a week that was better spec'd than my current system. I think it was ColorTyme or something.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks everyone for their comments. This was fun.

Thanks Chris

Got it Strike a blow for the revolution! Try Xfce!

A closing remark?
...funny this was the solution...

Thanks for the ride

No, it just proves he has some good taste. I used Arch until G3 flopped in like a hot turd. Now I run Gentoo where I can ensure a G2 environment a little bit longer. I'm very positive on the work other Archers are doing on the MATE fork.

Who knows...maybe one day Torvalds might create a new desktop manager that reflects how a desktop should be for linux users. While Kde and Gnome continue to focus on desktops to attract windows and Macs users.