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The PT410X thread: Linux/BSD and Open Source Software for users and beginners!

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ankhtahr:
I'm a fan of the Mate desktop. It's a fork of Gnome 2.3, which is still being developed further. Gnome 3 sucks, Unity sucks as well. Cinnamon is a Linux Mint only project, which makes it little unsympathetic to me. KDE4/Plasma is too big imho. I prefer lightweight software, and KDE is pretty much the opposite. XFCE is nice too, as is LXDE, so it's hard to decide which is better. XFCE is more self containing, while LXDE is more modular. I prefer XFCE, if it's about having a complete Desktop Manager, but LXDE utilities work great on other WMs too. On all my PCs I use XMonad as window manager. Getting used to it is pretty difficult, but then it's a absolutely amazing concept; also it's written in Haskell.

mtmerrick:
I'm not familiar with XMonad...

*googles*

Interesting, so it's like the ill-fated cornerstone for android?

ankhtahr:
I don't really understand what you mean by this. XMonad is very lightweight, and is a tiling window manager. This means, that it organises the windows for you. You just have to choose the tiling mode, and the windows are arranged. Maybe changing the ratio between the Windows with Mod+J and Mod+K, but then everything is fine. No moving windows around all the time. Though you can set some windows to be floating, which is good for popup windows and such.

Here's a screenshot of my current layout. The blue border shows which window has the focus currently, the other terminal windows have a slightly reduced brightness when they're out of focus.

Edit: wait, maybe I should have included the screenshot (doh!):
(click to show/hide)

mtmerrick:
Cornerstone for android, a brilliant 3rd party android OS level mod that provides android with true multitasking:

http://www.onskreen.com/cornerstone/

Was absolutely amazing until Google shut them down, saying it "corrupted" the android experience. Windows 8 &  Samsung's Multi-Window then proceeded to rip them off.

This looks a lot like that to me, at first glance.

ankhtahr:
Well, as far as I can see, Cornerstone has only this one fixed layout, while with XMonad you can configure various layouts, see here. Also XMonad is nearly purely keyboard driven, and it also has a great support for multiple monitors. Working with XMonad on a three monitor setup is absolutely amazing. Also you have 9 workspaces, between you can switch easily by pressing Mod-1 to Mod-9 (you can configure, which key to use as modificator. In the standard configuration it's Alt, but many configure it to use the Windows key. As many of my keyboards lack a Windows key I still use Alt). These workspaces can be configured any way you like. You can configure it, so that special windows get pulled to a workspace immediately (which is what I do. I pull my network manager and htop to workspace 9 automatically on boot), or that specific windows automatically set the workspace to a specific layout. That was usually done some time ago, before GIMP introduced the One-Window mode. If you started Gimp without any further configuration, it usually divided into the panel as main window, the workspace and the layers window as small windows on the right. With a few configuration tricks you could set XMonad up, to automatically arrange the windows in a three panel layout, divided vertically. Worked great, but it's unnecessary now.

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