I second that.

what disagreement? haven't you been reading the last few pages of the thread? the disagreement over whether Woodsman's example of the car mechanic was "elitist," which it obviously wasn't. then liquidtenmilion turns around and makes some elitist "satire" at some other people's expense.

Naaaaa.
I have seen worse .... LOL

Openbox, as far as I'm concerned, does not belong in this thread.

Why?

It's not included with the standard 10.2 install. While it would be nice, and does have some features that make it an interesting alternative, it is not in Slackware.

Nice possibility, but not here. That's why it's titled "What Desktop (included in Slackware install) do you use?". I wanted feedback for this narrow slice, because all the other threads/polls I've seen deal with all desktops. So the results for a Slackware user would be slightly skewed.

Imagine a newbie looking at this thread, wondering what DE or WM he wants to use, and comes across 'openbox'. "Huh? What's this? I don't have it! My install is messed up!".

So let's try to keep it to the stated question. I know it does, and will meander from time to time. So? Eventually, it'll get back on track.

cwwilson721 let us know why you chose KDE and XFCE over the other WM. You haven't posted your comments about that

good point.

though maybe it should be included in future releases.

I like marigolds, I've also "[thrown] away [my] precious desktops just so that [I] can use something that's relatively unknown and 1337." yay ratpoison! (Not for me.).

slackhack is right, a person isn't nessecarily trying to be 'l33t' when they use a different or unknown WM
liquidtenmilion is right, Many linux users would GLADLY throw away their precious desktops just so that they can use something that's relatively unknown and 1337. -- the keyword there is "many,"
Woodsman is right, productivity is very subjective.
cwwilson721 is right, Assuming is NOT the way.

There we go, everyone is right, so everyone can be happy.

Over-reaction seems to be turning into a theme in this thread.

OT -- I also use KDE, I find it just as useable and comfortable as Fluxbox.

edit:
Sure it goes back on topic while, I'm typing my mini-rant...

I agree. openbox may be good for a future release, maybe, if it gets a little more 'stable' in the Pat sense of the word.

Same as XFce4.4. It's cool, got nifty features, but I wouldn't have it as a part of a future release yet. Still 'beta', even by the devs. Somethings just take awhile...

Plus, you have the 'bloat' factor. About every few changes to Slackware -current, it's getting harder and harder to get the right stuff on 'only' 2 cd's (Which is one reason why my -current hardcopy is on a dvd-rw).

Still, all in all, I believe the Slackware has a fairly good diversity of DE's and WM's. There's KDE for the warm and fuzzy feel with all the apps. XFce for the slightly less apps included and a more stripped down feel. Fluxbox, for the radical in you. Blackbox, WindowMaker, and so on...

Can there be additions? Sure. But not until they're ready by Pat's standards. Should you install others? Sure. Go for it. It's your system. I just wanted a feel for what people use, and why.

Well I just switched my DE again, this time to FluxBox actually, just to see how it is, and its pretty nice, though the only thing that bugs me, is why am I logged in twice?

One for each x app? (Flux + a terminal)

Open another terminal and try again

You bring up a good point there. "Productivity" in the context of interfaces in general is kind of one of those relative things. Even more so it's an evolving thing for the user, especially when it comes to Linux.

For instance, a person would probably find DEs to be the most productive for them early on. In between that time they'll most likely find them limiting (depending on what they're doing or want to do with their system of course) and move on to various WMs etc. In a way though, doesn't the ultimate in productive end up mostly becoming and using a command line, as knowledge increases, in most cases?

Now here is where I contradict myself. For me, I personally feel that the ideal environment is a mixture of command line and gui. I really hate environments that are either just one or the other only. The reason is that I find some things more convenient to do from a gui (some types of applications you don't want alot of direct options for instance, but instead need a more laid back manner in which to approach things. A good example is like doing artistic type stuff.) while I find other things more appropriate or convenient to do through the command line (I prefer to do majority of configuration through the CLI since I have more direct control and can also know for sure what is going on). So my feelings is that it's about picking the "best tool for the job" like you mentioned. I find that the right tool for the job changes over time for me though. I guess I would say that the gui is ideal for when you want to play around with things to get them just how you want them and the CLI is when you need or want things to be an exact way. For the most part anyway.

Also, I tend to prefer, when I'm using a gui, for it to be as point and click oriented as possible. Otherwise, I figure there's not much point. Some of the things I don't like about some of the WMs is that you can't point and click the configuration of the WM itself much. Kind of makes it a pain and takes away the point IMHO. For instance, to this day, I still feel that AppleOS was the ultimate GUI. It went all the way for making things completely intuitive instead of to go several directions with things like some of the WMs and MS Windows does. I guess I figure if someone is going to make a GUI, then the goal should be to make it as user friendly, simple, and intuitive as possible, or as simple and laid back in nature as possible. Then I can just use the CLI for anything advanced.

Anyway, that's just my opinions on things, as well as preference. And that's kind of thing about all of this stuff -- that it really comes down to preference. Moreso, preferences are probably determined by habits and what someone is accustomed to. Probably even more than that, it's determined by motor memory since it take a bit of time and effort to retrain that. Like think of games and controllers. You've been playing a game for awhile with a certain controller to where you don't even consciously work the controls. Instead you just think about what you want your character to do in a general sense (eg. run over there and do some action). Then if you play with a different game or controller you have to think about what you're doing or maybe even look at the controls until your get used to it.

Whoa, yea you're right, I opened another xterm and typed users again.
That still seems a bit weird to me, but oh well. I guess the only other grievence I have with Fluxbox, is that I can't copy from a terminal window and paste it to say a text editor like emacs or even into firefox for some reason. I had to type out what the output was manually into firefox. hrmm..

Why not? I'm sure I've used the "select text and paste with mouse wheel button" method with Fluxbox before.

Apologies to cwwilson721, it would be my fault that this thread went into chaos. I was only interested in Hari's post :/.

PingFloyd,

Lots of good points in your post- welcome aboard!

Two things I wanted to speak to real quick, since I'm in the middle of some other stuff: I think the "minimalist" WMs like Fluxbox/Blackbox/etc. are minimalist because they don't offer GUI config. If you think about the differences between let's say, Xfce which is fairly light but still has GUI config, and KDE/Gnome, it all comes down to what else is packaged. In the case of KDE (more so than Gnome) you get a lot of apps along with it. Xfce is pretty skinny with just a file manager. So what's the next step down the ladder? Flux/Blackbox. What don't they offer that any other WM or DE doesn't offer? Just the config and set of apps.

So I think it breaks down like this:

If the minimalist WMs would start adding GUI config, how would they be differentiated from the intermediate? Part of the reason that they're light is because they don't include this stuff. And I honestly don't miss it at all. That said, some guys have written some GUI config addons for some of those, I don't remember exactly what, however.

On the topic of mixing GUI and command line, I think that in the UNIX world command line it's essential. There could be some desktop applications (as in uses, not apps) where they stay in the GUI all the time, like 99.9% of all winbloze users, but the Linux user is a little more sophisticated, I think, and the history is such that a lot of apps don't have GUI interfaces.

GUI is just a very nice add-on when it's appropriate, and in the middle are console apps that can run without X. I also run an OpenBSD desktop machine and I really like the console apps that run over there. Of course console apps can run on any *NIX.

So I don't think it's as much changing preferences or even evolving them; I think it's just a micro view of choosing the right tool for the job. Sure there are guys that use mplayer command line. If you don't have an X server running, fine. But stuff like that is a lot better using the GUI.

I don't think the issue with users is unique to fluxbox, but I may be mistaken. Pasting from terminals is also a general X issue and not Flux-related. There is supposed to be a way, but I never got it to work as the app is said to interfere with some other stuff and it needs a daemon to support it, so it was right out. Someone on here will know what to tell you on that.