[PLUG] Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Rogan Creswick wrote:
> On 8/1/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb at cesmail.net> wrote:
>>> - Reducing the number of Desktop Environments?
>> It's a nice dream, but I don't think either Gnome or KDE is going away
>> soon. I've actually come to like Gnome in recent months. :)
>>
> 
> Whoa! We're down to only Gnome and KDE now? This is one of the things
> that I really hate about the Ubuntu movement.  (The other biggie is
> that the division between UI and the rest of the computer's
> capabilities is being blurred to oblivion.  In a few years you
> probably wont be able to do *anything* useful w/out an xserver
> running, unless you really dig into customizing your system.)
> 
> There are many, many fully functional, efficient and sexy desktop
> environments / window managers out there, but their popularity is
> declining because no one has made a *new distribution* that installs
> one of them by default.  I don't know how many times I've heard some
> one complain that they'd like to use KDE but the don't want to
> reinstall their system with kubuntu.
> </rant>
> 
> (if you haven't, do your self a favor this weekend and 'aptitude
> install' some of these: enlightenment, fvwm, xfce, openbox, fluxbox,
> blackbox, afterstep, Window Maker or IceWM.  The *box varieties have
> even been ported to windows! After the install, logout and the new
> options should be on the session list in the graphical login screen.)
> 
> --Rogan

You're preaching to the converted -- I went through the "Oh crap KDE is
so bloated it makes me wanna hurl and Gnome just feels weird and is
almost as bloated" stage a year or so. I even wrote a couple of rants
about it on my blog.

I tried *all* the alternatives -- Enlightenment, IceWM, XFCE (4.2),
Windowmaker, Afterstep, FLWM, *box and even a couple of others that were
essentially mouse-free tiling xterm window managers. XFCE 4.2 was the
only "real desktop" among them, and XFCE 4.4 was about as bloated as
Gnome, so I ruled it out. I liked 4.2 though ... ran it for a while.

The conclusions I came to were:

1. If you *really* want a light desktop, "twm" isn't all that bad. Some
of the really light ones have a few more bells and whistles, but hey,
the X *apps* will run on "twm", and you can put them in the menu just
like any window manager, so why not just use "twm"?

2. Most of the other really light ones -- *box, IceWM, and the bizarre
ones -- were either too hard for me to use, not significantly better
than "twm", or had unreadable fonts.

3. That leaves the "big three": Enlightenment, Afterstep and
WindowMaker. I really like Enlightenment (with the Ganymede theme). It
just seemed a bit too edgy for me. Afterstep was just bizarre -- I never
did figure out how to do anything more complicated than open an X
terminal, and I wasn't crazy about the themes.

So I settled on WindowMaker. That's what I use on all my Linux boxes
now. I haven't gone whole hog and loaded the whole GNUStep development
environment yet. If there's a Gentoo GNUStep How-to out there somewhere,
I just might do that, however.

By the way, the last time I looked, WindowMaker was *way* out in front
of the window manager popularity contests. I don't see many updates go
by on Gentoo, so I don't know how its activity level compares with the
others.