Gnome
So, I want to build RoxOS. But yesterday I used a recent Gnome and it seemed pretty nice. The impression I have is that the Gnome people really have their heads screwed on and have the same goals for an OS that I do—they’ve got some keen hackers and a real focus on usability, what with people like Havoc Pennington and Seth Nickell on board. The Storage work and Project Utopia are just where I want my OS to be going. However, I don’t really want to buy into the whole Gnome deal; Nautilus seems unpleasantly bloated to me. Anyone got any thoughts? I moved away from KDE to ROX and a minimal window manager because I wanted a less heavy environment; I’d be getting all that back again with Gnome. Plus, I really like the way ROX works, it’s just that the rest of the desktop doesn’t work like it. Don’t know what to do…
I think the answer to your quandry would be to use Gnome for your desktop but replace the window manager. There are an awful lot of people that have echoed your sentiment about nautilus. I ran into the same issue and switched to using kahakai for my window manager. Of course, I’ve always had a soft spot for fluxbox…
Anyway, just look around for a different window manager to drop into Gnome in place of nautilus. You’ll get the best of both worlds.
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Have you taken a look at XFCE? It’s a complete but lightweight DE that looks very nice.
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Ah, here’s the thing. I don’t like XFCE. Moreover, it hasn’t got all the good usability stuff driving it that I mentioned. What I want is for all the Gnome usability and innovation guys to concentrate on a lightweight ROX-based desktop. Since they’re not going to, I have to decide whether I want to get the usability stuff for free but live with the weight, and use Gnome, or whether I want to reimplement the innovation stuff myself but have a nice light filer, and use ROX…
2 hours later
Ben: um, nautilus isn’t a window manager? Metacity is the Gnome WM, isn’t it? Nautilus is a filer. Now, I know I could use Gnome and ROX-Filer, but that seems a bit silly to me, because there’s no integration…
2 hours later
I swapped from KDE because of the bloat and moved to waimea and other *box types. But like you took a peep at gnome and loved what I saw.
Now I used gnome everyday and don’t miss the lighterweight alternatives. You are right about the filer but I do most of my file management in xterms so don’t run into it very often. It doesn’t stop me wondering why it should take longer than a web browser to load when all it does is browse the local file system.
give a newer gnome a spin and you will be amazed just how far it has come in the last couple of years. I use the latest sid packages and they are excellent, really stable and twice as quick as they used to be (IMHO)
Once you’ve had Gnome you don’t moan - to paraphrase a certain gentleman ;-)
13 hours later
How do you find Nautilus to be bloated? UI-wise or speed-wise?
41 hours later