I like one that looks nice but gets out of my way and let's me get work
done. Favorites: KDE Plasma since late version 4. They trimmed it down
and sped it up and with my customizations it serves well. My older go-to
is fluxbox. The menu system is simple, easy to customize, and just gets
out of my way faster and easier. I still use it a lot whenever plasma is a
problem or less readily available. On servers I fall back to a pure cursed
non-desktop and 'screen' with the screanie interface: any GUI is wasted
cycles there.
On Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 10:05 <dng-request@???> wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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> 1. Re: f2fs missing from the installer (ael)
> 2. Re: What do you guys like about Desktop Environments? (Steve Litt)
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: ael <adrian.lawrence@???>
> To: dng@???
> Cc:
> Bcc:
> Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2023 12:22:17 +0000
> Subject: Re: [DNG] f2fs missing from the installer
> On Mon, Dec 25, 2023 at 11:52:48PM +0100, Adrian Zaugg wrote:
> > On the image devuan_daedalus_5.0.1_amd64_server.iso you can find
> mkfs.f2fs:
> > e.g. see https://ftp.fau.de/devuan-cd/devuan_daedalus/installer-iso/
>
> Good. I may try that later today if I have time. Thanks for the pointer.
>
> ael
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Steve Litt <slitt@???>
> To: dng@???
> Cc:
> Bcc:
> Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2023 10:04:55 -0500
> Subject: Re: [DNG] What do you guys like about Desktop Environments?
> Didier Kryn said on Mon, 25 Dec 2023 18:48:13 +0100
>
> >Le 25/12/2023 à 04:52, Steve Litt a écrit :
> >> As far as launching apps, the way I do it is with dmenu from Suckless
> >> Tools. If you're a keyboard kinda person, dmenu is by far the fastest
> >> and most efficient way to launch apps.
> >Le 24/12/2023 à 21:27, Gianluca Zoni via Dng a écrit :
> >> over a decade ago I started using StumpWM. Desktop environments
> >> are a waste of time: you have to gesture to make yourself
> >> understood by the computer, when we can talk to it or give it the
> >> right commands by typing key combinations in a single "musical
> >> chord" on the keyboard. StumpWM is programmable and integrates
> >> seamlessly with Emacs, Mutt, Conkeror, ... especially because
> >> over the years I've built an entire system of scripts and
> >> programs that I call the "zigzag system".
> >
> > You both, what you achieved is the result of a lot of
> > configuration
> >and scripting work. Instead, any DE works almost fine out of the box
> >and is configurable through a menu.
>
> Yes, but...
>
> I'll elaborate later in this email.
>
> >
> > I think the general answer to the original question is that
> > heavily
> >using menus is less efficient than heavily using command-line,
>
> I believe the opposite: I'm a huge fan of menus, for beginners and pros
> alike. I'm the author of the UMENU and UMENU2 menu systems.
>
> > but, on
> >the other hand, a menu is self-documenting, therefore, more efficient
> >for applications you rarely use.
>
> Pre-Cisely!!! Menus rock!
>
>
> >For example, a terminal emulator is
> >the very interface for command-line, but do you like to spend days in
> >customizing its apearance? No, this very task you do only once is more
> >efficiently done through a menu.
> >
> > In Xterm, everything is configurable through one zilion
> >command-line options, which, in practice would imply to RTFM and write
> >one's own script to start it, because it does not read a config file.
> >Konsole, Gnome-terminal or Xfce4-terminal, what more are they than
> >front-ends to Xterm with config files and menu-driven configuration.
>
> Even though I don't use a Desktop Environment, I use lxterminal and
> xfce4-terminal and Sakura regularly. I never did learn the ins and outs
> of xterm.
>
> >
> > For what regards Dmenu, in all DEs there is an application menu
> > for
> >all applications which are "integrated" in the Freedesktop sense,
> >which just means they come with a .desktop file stored in
> >/usr/share/applications/ .
>
> I never knew that.
>
> > Do you, Steve, find it feasible to
> >automatically read all the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications/
> >and build a Dmenu tree for all of them?
>
> I could certainly do it no problem, but it's just not an itch I need to
> scratch.
>
> > Each .desktop file includes a
> >"category" which drives the structure of the menu as a two-level tree.
> >I think this kind of tool might boost the adoption of Dmenu.
>
> Why only two levels? Why not indefinite? UMENU2 handles an indefinite
> number of levels. Unfortunately, the guy who wrote UMENU2 (me) didn't
> (yet) bother to make it easy to configure (by adding a configuration
> mode), so I can't recommend it to most people.
>
> Back to your original distinction between a lot of configuration and
> working fine out of the box, configurable with a menu...
>
> First of all, I'm a huge fan of menus. I hated it when Gnome and Unity
> dispensed with menus in favor of Chicklets. And as somebody who must
> maintain his wife's Windows box, I hate the Windows' Chicklet
> interface. Menus are the way to go.
>
> And of course you're right. My system took a lot of configuration, and
> more than a little significant scripting. Once!
>
> As one example, about 15 years ago I wrote a program to convert a tab
> indented outline into a multi-level list of links (bookmarks). This is
> where all my bookmarks are. None is in a browser. I can switch browsers
> at the drop of a hat and have my (huge) outline of bookmarks. Using
> Unbound, I've made them available across my LAN. http://littlinks.cxm .
> This code is in my data directories, safe from overwrite by the
> packaging system. Basically, I can install any Linux distro on any
> hardware, tree copy my /d and /home directories, and have all my menus
> and scripts to the point where, regardless of distro or WM or DE, my
> workflow is the same.
>
> For maybe 15 years I've used my Python script called makeHtmlToc.py,
> that takes a well formed HTML file, and creates a table of contents
> based on all the id's of the <h1> tags. A lot of my work is HTML
> authoring, so this has saved me tremendous amounts of time and errors.
>
> Was making this stuff a lot of work? Of course it was. But it was done
> once. Meanwhile, I've had distro after distro go bad on me. First
> Redhat back when Redhat was good, then Caldera for an easier install,
> then Corel when anticipating using Linux as my daily driver, then
> quickly Mandrake/Mandriva when Corel became about the dollars. Because
> Mandrake/Mandriva was always a little shaky and sketchy, I switched to
> Ubuntu for several years until Ubuntu's training wheels became a real
> problem for me, then I switched to Debian just in time for the systemd
> thing, and then switched to Void Linux. It would have sucked to redo my
> workflow every time.
>
> Likewise, I started with fvwm which was just too much for me to handle
> at the time, then I switched to KDE until KDE's bloat slowed and
> crashed my computers. Next was IceWM, which would have been great
> except that its start menu was miserable to deal with and I didn't yet
> know about dmenu. So I switched to Gnome3, which was great until it
> became Gnome4, and I switched to Xfce, which worked great on OpenBSD
> but was glitchy and intermittent in (Ubuntu, I think) Linux. Then came
> LXDE, which is spectacular, but when I discovered dmenu I decided to
> save some screen real estate and go strictly Openbox. From the moment I
> discovered dmenu, my workflow has remained constant, except that when I
> wanted to improve it, I did.
>
> Not everybody's like me. Some haven't had so many distros implode on
> them as I have. Some refuse to do a little shellscripting and
> Pythonning. But I contend that whether you go in and menu-configure
> changes every time you switch distros or DEs or somebody comes out with
> a new version of something, as opposed to biting the bullet and
> hand-assembling programs *once* that do one thing and do it well, tying
> them together with shellscripts and the occasional Python program, over
> the decades it's about the same amount of work.
>
> One other thing that's different about me than some others. I'm a touch
> typist who hates reaching for the mouse. Which is why I use the
> qutebrowser browser so much. It's why I use dmenu and UMENU2. It's why
> I use Vim (not as opposed to Emacs, but as opposed to several mousy
> editors). My observation is that DE key-combos are really hard to
> remembers, so I end up using the mouse, which slows me down immensely.
> If I enjoyed using a mouse more than a keyboard, I'd probably use a DE.
> My setup would be silly for those who prefer to use a mouse, or who
> can't type at least 25 words per minute.
>
> I'm attaching a screenshot of UMENU2, a CLI program I created that
> I usually run in a terminal emulator. Like I said, I don't recommend it
> because of the difficulty of building and maintaining your menu system.
> I should create a configurator tool or configuration mode. But for me,
> it sure comes in handy, even with this disadvantage. Note that the
> ellipses indicate a choice is a menu instead of a command, and a carat
> indicates that the choice goes back up to the previous level, or if at
> the top level exits UMENU2.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
>
> Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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Re: [DNG] What do you guys like abo…
