demise of gnome

I am bidding fairwell to gnome desktop manager in my Linux userland. Of course gnome never reach my Mac domain. Due to unsuccessful booting of CRUX PPC Linux.

Am killing gnome from my userland is because of mixture of many elements. Among the first is there will be no more official support for gnome in Slackware. Therefore there is no more updates for gnome desktop manager in 10.1 or current branch. And things that depends on it tends to break. Gnome itself is broken because it depends on older stuff which has been upgraded.

Now, since there is a reason to move on, there is a need for subsitute. Although oneself can use fully command line Unix environment; it takes a while to be comfortable not to mentioned profesion with it. Yes, you can create (typeset is the correct term) beautiful documents without using M$ Office. Yes it is thousands upon thousands time better then M$ Office. Well we are not discussing that in this post.

There are two main substitute which I am using now; fluxbox and xfce. Fluxbox is very very minimal and very very fast. Let me emphasize FAST again. If you want to compare fluxbox with gnome or kde; fluxbox would be maglev train compared to steam train of gnome and kde. However, if fluxbox and xfce is compared, fluxbox wins hands down.

Desktop is more often then not eye candy instead of good user interface. Neither fluxbox nor xfce is very good user interface in terms of usability. But it is definately not a hamper to productivity. I would prefer fluxbox to xfce because of it is basically a very command line dependent GUI. Wherelse, xfce is neither here nor there (at stock). After configuration, it would be different of course. Back to the eye candy, xfce is definately more appealing to the eyes. However, if you take the pain to customize fluxbox, it can be better the fluxbox.

I will stil use both, just for the fun of it. But primarilly, fluxbox.