…what would you use? A tiling wm, a floating wm, xfce, gnome…? Me personally I never really liked DE’s. Besides one, maybe two, I’ve been this openbox geek since…2005-ish ( tempus fugit). Moreover, a lightweight freak. Debian cores with a Bang mindset loaded with scripts, cornerbindings…the works. Fast. Aiming for the under 100 mb boot.
That one wasn’t Debian though. That was one of the most amazing distros I’ve ever seen. Iso was about 100 mb, booted around 28 mb in lxde and was lightning fast. As in…instant. You had fast Pups…and then you had blazing Slitaz.
I took out chunks of the lxde and booted straight into a bang ( tint2/fbpanel/openbox). I actually bought this Napoleonistic pc for twice nothing to see if it would still fly. It did.
If there will be a full object orientated desktop like the OS/2 Warp Workplace Shell (WPS). Which is still only partly reached in the useability. But the new DE I don’t like with there setup.
It was not the design, it was the way to work.
Two examples (hope I remind me well due to the passed 30 years ago)
You generate a file in Images folder, close the application. Shift the file with e.g. command line, open the application and can still open the last file
You genetat a JPEG with applikation A and another JPEG with application B. If you double click in the file manager on the JPEG the right application will open.
Please keep in mind at this time you use VGA screens and Windows 3.1x!
You’re lucky. Your memory serves you well hahahahaha. I started using a computer very late. The only thing I knew about a computer was to edit the prices for my shop on windows…98 something? First pc I bought for daily use was about a year or so before Vista, go figure. That second feature you mentioned was possible in rox or spacefm if I recall correctly.
This is the last, in my opinion decent KDE desktop, until 5, I stopped using KDE during the Version 4 period, because of the, in my opinion, stupid resource hogging, Semantic desktop, at the time I had what was one of the most powerful laptops available, and even that felt sluggish, especially when I was trying to use both Windows and Mac in VMs, for software dev purposes. I solved my problem by moving to a GNOME desktop.
We don’t really have much choice.
Usually, content creators just choose a distribution and use the default or fine tune it, while geeks often want new technologies/specs such as wayland, etc. They prefer to go for an DE that has an active community behind it.
I’ve been using gnome since years ago, after unity was abandoned,Maybe I would try system76 in the future.
I went to GNOME 2 and Unity, and when GNOME 3 replaced GNOME 2, Linux Mint Cinnamon. When a LM Cinnamon upgrade bricked my computer, partly my fault, as I was using a large number of PPAs to get latest software and LM being a Point release, I decide to search for something more suitable for my needs, and found Manjaro KDE.
While it’s possible a lot of the issues I had with KDE4 were fixed during the cycle, I was glad to see the Symantic desktop thing seems to be abandoned in 5… unless it’s just what Manjaro do.
As 3d artist I use a lot Qt based apps, so I am somehow ‘forced’ to use KDE. But from last year I am having big problems with Qt and graphic tablets, that I am gonna, after more than decade of only using Linux, probably to switch to Win or OSX…
