:: Re: [DNG] So what desktop do you us…
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Author: Martin Steigerwald
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] So what desktop do you use?
Hi William, hello.

William Peckham via Dng - 21.09.24, 04:48:17 CEST:
> > William Peckham via Dng - 20.09.24, 01:36:32 CEST:
> > > I have KDE Plasma on Wayland, KDE Plasma on X11, Openbox on X11, and
> > > Wayfire on Wayland, and select from among them on logon depending
> > > upon
> > > my purpose for the day.
> >
> > Interesting.
> >
> > Would you like to share for which purpose you use which one and why?
> >
> > Also which applications do you use?
> >
> > Never heard about Wayfire so far.

[…]
> Sure!
>    Plasma is my daily desktop, with my tools for scripting and webmail,
> RSS reader, Social Media, Gemini protocol rendering, KDE Connect
> integration, etc.  It is highly customized with lots of custom
> keybindings, making it unsuitable for coding or testing code.


Ah, interesting. That would indeed be something that could not be covered
by using activities. Cause the key bindings would still be global.

>    Openbox or Fluxbox is where I code and test most things. 
> Uncomplicated, it does not interfere or get in my way or in the way of
> my IDEs or testing tools.


I see. I never got around to really testing something like Openbox. Maybe
coming from the Amiga I expect certain GUI stuff to work out of the box and
feared that I would need to much time to configure more minimal approaches
to do what I like.

There is some tiling window manager functionality implemented directly in
KWin meanwhile. But I am not even sure whether Openbox or Fluxbox is a
tiling window manager. Awesome is or has been and there were others as
well, but I have no idea what is up to date. And KWin certainly is not a
100% tiling window manager.

>    Wayfire, rather like Openbox for Wayland.  Fast, simple, complete,
> and fast.  (I know, I said that twice.  It gets me coming and going!) 
> I use it for testing the same code for compatibility with wayland (or
> often properly with XWayland).


Yeah, while Plasma and KWin is not slow… I bet such a minimal setup would
still be faster. On newer laptops opening a Konsole window is instant, at
least when the app has been used before and still is cached. But I still
remember a slight delay for opening even just a Konsole window while on
AmigaOS it felt like the shell window was there before I even clicked the
icon.

Maybe some day I dig into this stuff. At the moment I rather keep what I
have… with so much other stuff in my living moving around like crazy.
Actually there is a threshold before I consider to change something and
regarding KMail for example, my threshold is very high. I had a lot of
annoyances with it over the years and there are still some annoying issues
like crazy delays during POP3 retrieval – at least they know it¹ –, mainly
due to Akonadi misbehaving. But with half a dozen of mail accounts,
hundreds of folders, more than 1,5 million of mails stored locally, a ton
of local filters… I just don't want to migrate all of this. At least I did
not have to archive mails out of the folder structure for performance
reasons for a long time.

debian-devel-changes totals to more than 241000 mails and meanwhile is
actually quite usable. But I disabled thread grouping there cause it does
not make sense for that folder. And this makes things quite a bit faster.
When clicking it, it is between 5-10 seconds before I can access mails in
there. While I have seen a better performance with the web GUI of Zimbra
Groupware server a long time ago, it is not too bad. To what extent this
is due to improvements in Akonadi and PostgreSQL which I am currently
still using as database or modern laptop being much faster… I don't know.
So far KMail/Akonadi did not learn the trick Zimbra was using. It just
said: "Ah you like to see this folder? Well I give you the first 2000 mails
and only if you scroll down I give you more". It was almost instant even
with a LKML folder with more than 450000 mails in it! KMail/Akonadi still
needs look at all mails in a folder to fully display it. It incrementally
updates… but it is no fun using KMail during that updating interval. I
look forward to migrate to SQLite3 once everything is in place for that. I
think the planned database migrator is still missing.

What do you code? If you like to share.

Best,
--
Martin