begin quoting Joshua Penix as of Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 05:11:58PM -0800: > On Jan 24, 2008, at 4:17 PM, James G. Sack (jim) wrote: > > >Does anyone feel comfortable comparing (or moderating) KDE vs Gnome? > > I don't know that a "vs" setup would be worthwhile, but this tickles > an idea I've had in the back of my head for a year or two... > > How about a series of presentations that focus not on desktop > environment features or comparisons but instead on ways of getting > more out of your chosen desktop, as demonstrated by expert users? I'd > like to see power users of some of the common desktop environments > give a 30-45-minute-ish presentation on what their daily workflow > looks like and what features of their desktop they use to their > advantage. We might need a skeleton outline for such a thing.
> Windowmaker, for example, is a common power user desktop used by at > least John and Neil. I've tried Windowmaker myself, but found the > strange concepts of the clip and dock a little foreign, and wasn't > sure how to best take advantage of them. I've been using WindowMaker for years, but I haven't been exploring the boundaries of what it can do; it got to a point where it was "good enough", and I moved on to the next shiny thing. Watching someone else use WindowMaker would likely be helpful to me. :) > Watching John simply *use* > his desktop for 20 minutes would probably teach me more than I could > get in four hours of documentation reading. Indeed. Everyone in my immediate area is now using WindowMaker, mostly because the looked over my shoulder and cried "How did you *do* that?" It's not that the other environments *can't* do the same things -- I drifted to WindowMaker from fvwm2, because WindowMaker was the easiest thing to configure for the sorts of things I had spent years beating fvwm2 into doing for me. (Had AmiWM stayed under development, I might well be using that. I like draggable desktops!) > Common DE's that should definitely be covered (need volunteers!): > - Gnome > - KDE > - XFCE > - Windowmaker > > More obscure DE approaches that might be interesting: > - Ratpoison or one of the other "window-less" window managers > - Open/Black/Fluxbox > - Emacs (LOL!) > - ??? > > And to be really complete, considering the sheer quantity of OS X > users in KPLUG, a Mac desktop demo would probably be of interest. I Heh. I try to set OS X up as much like WindowMaker as I can. . . > could also see value in doing a Windows demo showing how to get the > most Unix-y experience out of it, considering that Linux guys often > get stuck on a Windows machine from time to time. Last time I was stuck in MSWindows land, I very nearly had a useful environment. I wish I would have written down (or better yet, burned a CD) the tools I installed and the tweaks I made to get it there. > I could see this actually being a 2-3 meeting series, since we'd want > to leave ample room for Q&A. ... and not all at the end. Five or ten minutes presenting, and then some Q&A, so that folks don't forget their questions. This would also seem like a good topic for dual presenters; we half get that already during Q&A sessions, it seems. -- Am I doing poetry here? I mean doggerel, I fear. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-steer
