10 Most Beautiful Looking Linux Desktops | Hacker News Reader

10 Most Beautiful Looking Linux Desktops

linuxhaxor.net

12 pointspavs14 comments

These are all ugly and useless. My desktop is better:

http://disk.jrock.us/bingo/public/random/desktop-20080518.pn...

Notice how all the space is being used for actual work instead of pretty pictures. Computers are for doing things, not looking at.

Which window manager are you using? And what chat program is that (running on an emacs shell?)

It's probably ion (could be wmii or any other tiling wm), and the irc client is irssi.

Actually, it's xmonad and erc.

Nice. I like flat desktops; I will never understand the appeal of faux-3D interface elements.

I must, however, confess to a weakness for transparent terminals.

http://scratch.flyoverblues.com/screen.png

What are you using to serve your fonts?

I don't really know enough about Linux fonts to answer that. The window manager, Ion, does not support Xft because its author hates anti-aliasing, so I'm not sure what is rendering the title bars -- just X, I think. The terminal font is Inconsolata as rendered by rxvt-unicode with Xft support. (Emacs is being run -nw, so it's just using the same terminal fonts.)

I got excited but #1 is a mockup

And for the others no links or clues as to what desktop environment or window manger is used, nor what theme, background, or distro ... basically some eyecandy with no content.

Most of them are pretty easy to tell, but many could be done in just about any window manager.

  1. Not real.
  2. Mac4Lin.
  3. Not absolutely clear, but note that thunar's internal menus are displayed in the toolbar instead of the window, like a mac. It could be Mac4Lin again, but I'm guessing it's not real, unless there's something about thunar I don't know.
  4. Enlightenment.
  5. Pekwm.
  6. Enlightenment.
  7. Could be anything. It does have a Gnome footprint on the bottom right, though, so I'd guess metacity.
  8. Fluxbox. (yay!)
  9. I'm not sure. Probably compiz-fusion.
  10. Could be anything.

Desktop 10 has "C:\".

That's unfortunate - #1 was the only interesting looking one :(

Yep, #1 is a quite popular and highly rated idea for Topaz (GNOME 3.0) over at Gnome-Look: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/May-B?content=45837

By the way, if anyone likes #3, it can be easily pieced together with:

* Mire v2 GTK theme (http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Mire+v2+themepack?con...) with the included Emerald window decorator theme

* area o.42 icons (http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/area+o.42+SVG+icon+th...)

* gnome2-globalmenu (http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/) for the OS X unified menu bar

if I'm being honest, I think I prefer Vista to all of those, excepting perhaps the mockup, #1.

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