[conspire] Desktop survey

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Before installing Debian on my new machine, I need to decide on which
> desktop: cinnamon, gnome, kde,lxde, mate, and xfce.  Too many choices.
> 
> I am asking everyone to name their personal preference and a brief
> "why".

I'll give three in order:

1.  None of the above.  Why:  The notion that one must run a 'Desktop
Environment' (DE) suite in order to have comfortable desktop computing
is simply false.  A DE is just a marketing concept for a specific X11
window manager bundled with a graphical file manager and a suite of
applications and applets of similar appearance that all rely on the same
graphics toolkit.  You just don't _need_ to have one of those kitchen
sinks as a bundlle.  Instead, you can run your personal preference in
X11 window manager, and pick any or all other applications you wish, and
avoid the ones you have no use for, on an a la carte basis.  

My strong preference is for the latter approach.  If I go shopping for a
stand mixer for my kitchen, I'd rather not be sweet-talked by the
department store salesman into purchasing instead a bundle consisting of
a stand mixer, a blender, a spice grinder, a new kitchen faucet, and
several hundred matching floor tiles.  _I just want a stand mixer._  
A DE strikes me as analogous to just such an overblown bundle.

Another frequent misconception to avoid:  Installing a DE (example, KDE)
with its default applications and applets in no way prevents you from
also installing and enjoying applications ordinarily bundled with a
different DE (example: GNOME).

tl;dr:  The common notion that DEs are some sort of monolith that
constrain one's choice of code is somewhere between a user delusion and
a developer con-job, and in any event should be avoided.

How do you _not_ run a DE?  The easiest way is to not install one in the
first place, which is usually trivially easy if you just pay attention
during the installation and avoid doing a 'forehead install', one you
complete by just repeatedly hitting the space bar with your forehead.
In other words, when you hit the screens where you pick what to install
and not to install, _do that_.  Don't just accept defaults.

If you happen to have done something like a forehead install and ended
up with a DE, it's not at all difficult to disable or remove the DE.
To disable it, disable whatever startup script launches the X11 session
manager.  To remove it, use your distro's package tool.

If you don't know how to do that, _learn_.  Otherwise, you're not a Linux
user, just a tourist.  Ability to decide what your system runs, and
ability to decide what is and isn't installed, are ground-level Linux
101 learning tasks all newcomers should learn soonest.


2.  Moksha Desktop (https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/), as 
provided by desktop distribution Bodhi Linux, a third-party variant on
of Ubuntu Linux LTS.  Why:  Elegant, sparse, fast.  (Moksha Desktop is
a startlingly effective descendant of the Enlightenment window manager
famous in the early 2000s, invented by two of my colleagues at VA Linux
Systems, known by their online nicknames Mandrake and Rasterman.)
Please note, if trying Bodhi Linux, that the distro's _default
installation_ is deliberately minimal.  The intention is that you will
then use AppCenter, Synaptic, or apt-get to install whatever packages
you want.  See:  https://www.bodhilinux.com/w/adding-software/


3.  LXDE (older) or LXQt (replacement).  Why:  LXDE is a lightweight, 
fast DE based on the gtk+ v. 2 graphical toolkit.  The developers found,
fiveyears ago, however, that gtk+ v2 was a development dead-end 
because the GNOME people EOLed the toolkit and because newer versions of
gtk+ necessitated near-total code rewrites and also that the developers
were increasingly hostile and unhelpful to anyone outside the GNOME
project.  Therefore, they made a difficult choice to migrate away from 
gtk+ to the alternative Qt graphical toolkit (best known as the toolkit 
underlying KDE), joining forces with separate Razor-qt DE project to
create a successor called LXQt.

Some distros still ship LXDE, but it is in the ongoing process of being
discontinued.  For example, Lubuntu now ships the LXQt DE as of Lubuntu
18.10, released in October 2018.



Tip:  To find out what distros provide particular DEs, use Distrowatch's
search page.