No icons on the desktop is a deal-breaker for a lot of people. GNOME tried to do that, and was quickly forced to bring back that option. An empty default desktop is one thing, but not being able to use it would make what I do much more difficult.
I have heard things like "fat pig" used to describe KDE, but even ultralight environments can be set up to run the file manager and have icons on the desktop. One of the lightest there is, although development is minimal these days, is Icewm. By default it is just a taskbar, tray, and window manager, but you can put anything you want in the startup scripts. I use it in my netbook with gnome-settings-daemon, nemo, and nm-applet to make a very light but fully usable desktop. Main advantage is rapid responsiveness-and the ability to play 720p video because almost all of that tiny processor is available. Main disadvantage is that all menu and taskbar launcher editing must be done by hand editing text files. A few GUI applications to edit the menus and startup scripts, and Icewm could be the basis of an ultralight desktop used for almost any purpose. No more being stuck with a particular file manager or an integration issue-it doesn't even depend on GTK. Very good as the basis of a custom nonaccelerated DE. <snip> >Yes KDE is a bit of a resource hog. I would like to slim down xfce >even. I >would like to get rid of anything that puts icons on the desktop, >like the >instance of thunar that runs at session start. > -- Ubuntu-Studio-devel mailing list Ubuntu-Studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
