The Pragmatic Desktop - Desktop Customization & Workflow

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lee
Long time nixers
Hello everyone,

We all want our desktops to be practical. We also want them to be sexy as hell. Lets bring our ricing knowledge together and create the most practical sexy desktop on the planet. Here's how this is going to work:

* Propose what (or should not) be featured in a desktop
* Explain why
* Try and show a screenshot : )

or

* Argue against what someone thinks

and most importantly, have fun with this!


I'll start:

I think conky should not be featured in a desktop set up. How often do people really look at their system stats? Even then there are probably better alternatives to looking at them, such as in a status bar or a notification activated by a hotkey. No screenshot because there would be nothing to show : )
venam
Administrators
I think multiple workspaces/desktops/virtual-spaces or whatever you call them are a must for a practical desktop.
zygotb
Long time nixers
I agree about the usual conky-in-screenshots-is-unnecessary, and figure that those who use conky on the desktop are merely following what they've seen elsewhere.
yrmt
Grey Hair Nixers
I don't want anything drawn on my screen it there are no windows open. I do use 9menu to spawn stuff with the mouse buttons.
venam
Administrators
I once upon a time, I had a huge conky. It was getting addictive, all I wanted was to see all my updates in one single place.
Now that I wrote my "updater.py", I just left it open on the first workspace and let it do it's job. It's way less obtrusive.
Mafia
Long time nixers
Well it has to look sexy.
dunz0r
Members
Conky can be useful for showing things like your calendar or the weather though.
Mafia
Long time nixers
(17-04-2013, 03:06 PM)dunz0r Wrote: Conky can be useful for showing things like your calendar or the weather though.

I rather put that into a statusbar of some sort.
venam
Administrators
It should obviously have all the basic applications.
pdf viewer, image viewer, webbrowser, terminal emulator, media player, etc..
I would also go for a GUI file manager like Thunar because it's more practical.
Red
Long time nixers
Conky can be handy for monitoring your resources on a old machine.
My idea of a perfect desktop is, making sure the menu has quick links to your commonly used applications and 4 work spaces. The sexy part, i just let my wallpaper handle that lol.

Quick Edit. I also must have xpad to make sure i don't forget things. I am VERY forgetful!
Nihility
Members
I don't want panels, statusbars on my desktop, I only need dmenu to spawn applications.
dunz0r
Members
(18-04-2013, 02:35 AM)Mafia Wrote:
(17-04-2013, 03:06 PM)dunz0r Wrote: Conky can be useful for showing things like your calendar or the weather though.

I rather put that into a statusbar of some sort.

Might just be semantics, but to fit a calendar, you'd need a pretty tall statusbar.

There are better solutions than specifically conky for that though. But it's nice to draw it as an overlay on your background. I don't know of anything else that can do that besides conky.

I actually don't use conky, got my calendar on my phone. But here's how you could use it:
http://hax0r.se/files/img/conky.png

Another thing a pragmatic desktop must have is a good texteditor. Without vim, I just get compile errors like "hhjj is not defined in this scope" and so on. Perhaps a compiler for C and C++ plus perl and python interpreters are an important aspect too?
venam
Administrators
(21-04-2013, 06:42 AM)dunz0r Wrote:
(18-04-2013, 02:35 AM)Mafia Wrote:
(17-04-2013, 03:06 PM)dunz0r Wrote: Conky can be useful for showing things like your calendar or the weather though.

I rather put that into a statusbar of some sort.

Might just be semantics, but to fit a calendar, you'd need a pretty tall statusbar.

There are better solutions than specifically conky for that though. But it's nice to draw it as an overlay on your background. I don't know of anything else that can do that besides conky.

I actually don't use conky, got my calendar on my phone. But here's how you could use it:
http://hax0r.se/files/img/conky.png

Another thing a pragmatic desktop must have is a good texteditor. Without vim, I just get compile errors like "hhjj is not defined in this scope" and so on. Perhaps a compiler for C and C++ plus perl and python interpreters are an important aspect too?
Oh! this conky doesn't look really good.
One thing conky is good at is this:
[Image: tGi]
Nihility
Members
(21-04-2013, 07:43 AM)venam Wrote: One thing conky is good at is this:
[Image: tGi]

woah!
:(){ :|: & };:
zygotb
Long time nixers
ASCII boobies!
Nice!