On 07/28/09 10:30 AM, Luis de Bethencourt wrote: > Hello everyone! > > I was wondering... what do you feel is missing in the OpenSolaris > Desktop? We all have our small little things that we miss from the > linux (rest of open source) world: this or that useful software that > is in Ubuntu, or that nice feature that is in FreeBSD.
What about features in Solaris (CDE) that are gone? I particularly miss the old sdtperfmeter - the gnome meter is buggy and uses too much of too many resources (memory, cpu, and real estate). Emulating MSWindows can sometimes be a step in the wrong direction :). How about the ability to navigate through the applications menu and others by right clicking on the background? IMO what you get now is useless. Something else we seem to have lost is the ability to group windows and drag/minimize/delete them as a group. If you have more than a trivial number of windows open, the window list becomes quite useless. In fact you could eliminate the panels entirely by using the ability to click on the background with all three mouse buttons. A sort of minimalist desktop :). Might be nice to get rid of all those useless icons on the background as well... Who hasn't lost a window by having it end up outside the visible area? The Window selector should have a drag option much like right-clicking on a window list icon does now. Add these together and you'd have a nice icon free desktop. Right click would give you the applications menu. Middle click would give you the running list with the submenu min/max/move etc,. Left click/drag would let you group. Just imagine, a completely blank screen after you log in - right in the Unix tradition! Oh well... Maybe I missed a configuration option, but how about not bringing windows to the front unless you hit the front key or click on the title bar? If you are copying and pasting from one window to another it used to be easier because you could keep the source window on top. The old CDE was pretty klutzy, but it did have some nice features... The following has been much discussed, and I understand that the VT feature has the same effect, but why not have a command line login option? I suppose there are arcane reasons why not, but the inability to kill gdm has had me frustrated a few times, and on Linux RHFC at least the VT feature has been pretty unreliable. Please don't go too far down the incomprehensible info (vs. man pages) path. Fine if you are an Emacs expert, but a nightmare if not (439 lines in the commands list appendix!)... Make the compose key work again (or is that another configuration option?). Finally (this has been discussed before) the ability to remember what applications were running and to restart them on login. This seemed to work quite well with CDE and there are other WMs that can do it, but gnome lost the ability somewhere along the way... My 10? worth...
