I'm sick of switching back and forth between desktop environments. KDE is as good as it gets unfortunately, so I've decided to try my hand at making my own.
Discuss what you think the perfect DE would be. Also feel free to tell me how much of a faggot I am for not using SpectrWM or Openbox + Tint2 or something else.
Yea you know I like the look of some of these DE's but I always find myself going back to xfce
For me, it just werks.
Zachary Hill
OP here. KDE is what I use day to day. It's my favorite of the bunch. However, my primary complaints against KDE are as follows: The panel is coupled with Plasma desktop. Meaning, you cannot install just the panel and use it independently of Plasma desktop. They removed tiling mode support. Cannot have different virtual desktops per monitor. Does not remember multi-monitor configurations.
Camden Thompson
Ah alright, so nothing I really intend to use. Fair enough.
Owen Nguyen
Wait, except for multi-monitor stuff. I'm not sure what you're on about with that. I use two monitors and it always works fine. What exactly is the issue you've run into with that?
Jack Wright
Be able to add arbitrary stuff to titlebar like client's cpu and memory usage and shit
Andrew Walker
global menu would be comfy
Noah Lewis
I have a laptop that I plug in to 2 external monitors at work. It does not remember which monitor is which and I have to swap the ports to get KDE to position them correctly. OSX with all the exact same hardware can remember which monitor is which regardless of which ports they are plugged in.
Jace Murphy
This is something you could do in KDE in it's current state. You can create widgets which can run on the desktop or be added to the panel. There is probably one that has cpu and memory info in it already. I intend to also have a widget based panel like KDE in my desktop environment.
Global menu is probably going to be tricky. KDE supports global menu for Qt applications. However, GTK does not play nice with it. It would probably take a lot of research to determine the best way to build a global menu so that it supports Qt and GTK and also leaves itself open to support other window toolkits in the future.
Daniel Ross
Oops nevermind, I didn't realize you said titlebar. I'll have to think about that. That may be do-able.
Landon Martinez
>Discuss what you think the perfect DE would be Unity. But with CCSM better integrated into the normal OS settings panels, and with more clarity around what causes the dash to index some data files and not others.
Evan Morales
BUGS U G S
Christian Thomas
I didn't use Unity much. Can you list the features you like about it? What is CCSM?
Carson Green
Unity is so good. Here are some things I like: 1. Stable. I had too many issues with broken shit in KDE, even adding the search box mod to the menu would cause random DE crashes. A DE with no search box is useless to me. 2. A fairly complete set of keyboard shortcuts configured by default. 3. A polished and functional dash and panel that makes it easy to 'pin' shortcuts and easy to do a text search for applications and even files. 4. CCSM is the optional control panel for configuring the 'compiz' functionality of Unity. Lets you turn off animations and configure all kinds of random shit, including more keyboard shortcuts.
Jacob Morgan
>search box mod >A DE with no search box is useless to me Can you elaborate on this point? I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "search box".
Matthew Thomas
>Discuss what you think the perfect DE would be. Making a DE is a mistake to begin with. All you need is a window manager.
Jayden Baker
What's the point of a window manager if you don't actually use any applications in it?
Alexander Davis
I do, of course. Running Emacs has nothing to do with a DE.
Carson Jones
>Discuss what you think the perfect DE would be. It's called Cinnamon.
Search box is where you type to search for the application you want. Windows has it, Unity has it, and it's been awhile since I used KDE, but I believe you have to actually go in and select to add it in KDE.
So for instance, I have some programs I don't use often enough to put in my toolbar. I hit meta and then i type eg. 'thunderbird' and hit enter. It's way faster than having to navigate folders in a menu.
Michael Hernandez
>probably Qt because fuck GTK devs Then why not help lxqt development instead of making something new that no one will use and you're going to lose interest in couple of months at best?
Gabriel Torres
>it's been awhile since I used KDE, but I believe you have to actually go in and select to add it in KDE. alt-f2 on older versions or alt-space on newer versions launches krunner which does exactly what you are describing. This has been in KDE for many years. It's actually coupled with plasma desktop, which is one of the things that bothers me.
Jace Peterson
>literally just LXDE with qt-compiled binaries No thank you. I'm not looking to use yet another shitty no-features DE. I'd rather join the KDE dev team then do that.
Brody Ross
That's like saying it's ctrl+alt+t in gnome. Sure I can open a fucking terminal and type in my command name and hit enter. That is not the full functionality of a good application search.
James Brown
What are you talking about? KRunner is highly configurable and can do a lot more than that. Pic related. In addition to that, there are a wide variety of third party plugins for even more functionality.
Asher Cooper
OK i just pulled up a video of krunner. It's better than what I was thinking. Still it's retarded to have it assigned to alt+f2 or even alt+space. It should be integrated with the k-menu or whatever KDE's start menu equivalent is.
Christopher Martin
>Still it's retarded to have it assigned to alt+f2 or even alt+space. It should be integrated with the k-menu or whatever KDE's start menu equivalent is. I disagree. I literally do not use the KDE application launcher. Also, there is more than one application launcher. The application launcher is just a widget you add to the panel. I choose to forego that widget, but still use krunner regularly.
Hunter Walker
Honestly I used to think KDE was the best, but they lost me at about 4.3 when I got tired of waiting for them to fix all the shit they broke with 4.0.
Even then 3.5 was not as stable as it might have been.
Luis Torres
I still think KDE is the best, but it has some flaws and they waste too many dev cycles maintaining useless software like Konqueror. Unless they are going to make a Firefox or Chromium fork, they shouldn't waste their time on a web browser at all imo.
Chase Butler
There how it works in kde as well. Meta and just start typing.
John Garcia
When my freelance webdev business got serious, I stopped fighting desktop Linux and bought an imac (after hackintoshing to test the waters). It's ridiculously overpriced but it's worth it for osx/macos. Everything 100% justwerks, the UI is fantastic, and I still have a full *nix base.
If you produce anything with your setup, I strongly recommend you consider the same.
Jacob Ramirez
>When my freelance webdev business got serious, I stopped fighting desktop Linux and bought an imac (after hackintoshing to test the waters). It's ridiculously overpriced but it's worth it for osx/macos. Everything 100% justwerks, the UI is fantastic, and I still have a full *nix base. I hope you are trolling. I have a work issued macbook that I ran OSX on for 2 years before giving up on it and installing Arch Linux. KDE > Aqua.
Jonathan Carter
Glad you found a setup that works well for you.
William Carter
I know the feeling. OSX is the buggiest environment I've ever used. Bluetooth stack is shit. Window manager is shit. Compatibility with 3rd party peripherals is shit. I can't understand how people put up with it desu.
Jaxson Green
>* Bare Minimum Keyboard Shortcuts >- Switch to desktop-N As far as virtual desktops and their relevant keyboard shortcuts goes, you should take a hint from OS X and GNOME.
>keyboard shortcut to switch desktop left/right, or up/down >automagically create a new desktop if there isn't one upon going right or down >automagically remove a desktop upon leaving it with no open windows
Make it a toggle for those that prefer having static desktops, then take a hint from Xfce as well with a keyboard shortcut to create or remove a desktop.
Aaron Parker
Openbox and tint2 here. I am using two screens with it using probably xrandr but I adusted them in arandr. Once is with the hdmi and the other is through the vga. I don't have a graphics card just the onboard graphics on the cpu. It works alright. Has tint2 on both screens and starts up and shuts down fine with remembered settings. One of those, "i wonder if this will work" kind of moments. I'm out. Too tired. Just wanted to see how the anons are doing.
Grayson Rogers
just make a qt based xfce with proper vsync. Hell even normal xfce with proper vsync would be enough for most people
Ethan Fisher
this is correct
Thomas Walker
just use Budgie
Aiden Cox
I agree with you on one point, I hated chacging DEs too. Then I tried MATE and never looked back. It's not the prettiest of the bunch, but I'll take stability over eye candy any day of the fucking week.
Tyler Kelly
>Good DE Visually appealing Easy customization File picker with thumbnails Seamless FTP/SMB integration File manager that doesn't crash Friendly control panel Native VNC support Smartphone connect Addons Widgets Advance setting manager
So it should be >QT >POSIX >Support Non-free software >Drop wayland
Parker Walker
>Does not remember multi-monitor configurations. it does. it's an old bug that was fixed in plasma 5.8 (or was it qt 5.8? I don't recall - either way it works now).
Grayson Price
KDE is the only DE that support wacom button configuration OOTB.
Austin Ross
>Muh XFCE 1. No real control 2. Broken thunar 3. Out-dated plug-ins 4. Conflict with Xorg 5. Font rendering
Christopher Hill
Its a CLI until it needs X and then has floating X windows over the cli with no panels or anythijg atupid like that