Olaf Meeuwissen said on Fri, 09 Apr 2021 19:59:26 +0900

>Hi Steve,
>
>Steve Litt writes:
>
>> Mate via Dng said on Fri, 09 Apr 2021 00:23:29 +0300
>>
>>
>>>My own preference is 3rd Gnome.
>>
>> What would Gnome give you that you can't get from other Window
>> Managers and Desktop Environments (WM/DE)?
>
>A familiar work environment, perhaps?

That's always nice, but for a person not wanting systemd, in the long
run Gnome is a dead end. I was wondering about specific features and
elements of workflow.

>
>I ditched GNOME a long while ago myself and did the same with KDE but
>somehow can't get myself to ditch Xfce and get back to a hand-rolled
>.xinitrc like I used to use a couple of decades ago ... go figure.

There's a lot less reason to ditch xfce: It still (AFAIK) works well
with sysvinit and runit and s6 and openrc, without doing anything
special.

>
>It's all really a matter of inertia.

I'm a big fan of inertia. Life's too short to change your workflow
every month. But when you see a dead end coming down the road, or when
the status quo is getting too difficult, sometimes its best to make
your move earlier rather than later.

>Or muscle memory.

I'm a big fan of muscle memory. I use Vim. Nuff said?

But sometimes there are compelling reasons to move to other software
and relearn your muscle memory. Heck, if I never changed muscle memory,
I'd still be using Wordstar :-)

>
>Going off-topic
>
>> By the way, are you a touch typist who can type over 35 wpm?
>
>In what language? And what educational level of prose?
>
>I am a touch typist, certified, mind you, and hit somewhere between 135
>and 140 cpm (including spaces and punctuation but no funny accents) on
>a mechanical typewriter way back in secondary school at the exam. In
>my native language, that works out to about 17 or 18 words for a normal
>newspaper article. In English, I thinks it's more like 20. In German
>it'd be even less, probably around 15. In Japanese ... who knows.

What I was getting at is that the 35 wpm typist, assuming a word is 5
characters and 1 space, is probably better off using a user interface
like I have (simple window manager + dmenu + UMENU2, or XFCE + dmenu
but no UMENU2) rather than a more mousy UI. At 20 WPM, I could make a
case for your using a UI like mine, or make a case for your using a
mouse driven one. My understanding is that Gnome3 has some great
workflow features for the mouse-centric user, but other WM/DEs (Window
Manager or Desktop Environments) are also very performant for the mouse
centric.

>
># And let's not add predictive input methods to the mix ;-)
># Me very much dislikes those.

If you mean these things that guess the word you mean and finish it for
you, yeah, those are horrible.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Gnome is nice and all that, but it's
not the end of the world if you don't use it, and the way things are
going, sooner or later you won't be able to use it, and perhaps it's
better to change your muscle memory at your leisure than to
unexpectedly be forced to do it after an upgrade.

Also, for anyone typing 35 WPM or more, life is more productive when
you use the keyboard more and the mouse less, and that can be
accomplished by adding dmenu, and possibly UMENU2, to any WM/DE.

SteveT

Steve Litt
Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques