Comment by devereaux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devereaux | Hacker News Reader

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Personally, I gave up on Gnome and run LXDE a bit like i3 - autopositionning the windows with Fx keys mapped to a given set of coordinates, so F10 will make a window use a square on the left covering 80% of the screen, F11 will move the window to the remaining 20% on the right, thus hiding conky - etc. The only advantage I find in LXDE is that it has a titlebar I can 'reveal' if I wish to mess around and fiddle with the window position (like when tracking the arping replies in a remote lan and using a bit of scripting to see the evolution of the metric as I fiddle with things)

I like my desktop lean and mean. I do not want distractions. When I am dealing with a remote system crashing under load, the last thing I want is my desktop or my shortcuts to behave in weird ways. Things must always work, in a consistent way. Funny thing is I can only get that in Linux... and in Windows 10.

Customization is a feature, just not everyone needs that feature.

So I disagree with your assessment, as some users will find Gnome or KDE too distracting.

Some people try that, too (and XFCE). Admittedly, they're better than a tiling window manager, but LXDE's last stable release was 2016 and it doesn't have a compositor so all of that graphics hardware in your computer specialized to prevent X11 DAMAGE events from forcing applications redraws and for saving power is going unused.

Does using a compositor really _save_ power in practice? GNOME's one certainly doesn't, in my experience. It would spin my fans up after a few moments of dragging a window around. Of course it has no configuration options so it is not possible to fix it. kwin is almost as bad last time I checked on my hardware.

I agree ; I'm considering moving to wayland but still now LXDE does everything I need well enough to not have bothered for the last few years

I'm curious what you find distracting in Gnome? Unless you're running in Classic mode the newer versions got rid of everything except the top menu bar and that is less busy than it used to be. The default launcher works very well using the keyboard only, I actually quite like it (though there are definitely other things I don't like about the Gnome defaults).

What I find distracting: the menu bar indeed, the file manager on the desktop, the title bar of the windows, the buttons on the titlebars of the windows

That doesn't leave much of gnome.

> The only advantage I find in LXDE is that it has a titlebar I can 'reveal' if I wish to mess around and fiddle with the window position

Unless I'm misunderstanding, you can use Alt + left click to move any window around, and Alt + right click to resize. No need to reveal the title bar except perhaps to read the occasional title.

Correct, I really like alt left click to move windows but for some reason I prefer resizing with the title bar even if takes one more event (keypress) to make it show up, and one more to remove it when I'm done.

Off topic, but have you looked at LXQt? It is surprisingly nice, albeit with slightly more memory usage.

I never thought I could move away from LXDE but I think I'm going to soon.

Interesting - I will consider it, thanks a lot for the suggestion! Memory use is a concern, but so are wakeups in a tickles kernel on a laptop.

At the moment I'm considering Sway mostly because of the wide use and community, but it's a "long term" project this month or the next :-)

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