New subject: Fwd: Debian desktop news

9 Aug 2012

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan MacDonald &lt;allcoms(a)gmail.com&gt;
Date: Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 12:24 PM
Subject: Re: [LAU] Debian desktop news
To: gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 11:27 AM, david &lt;gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com&gt; wrote:
...
  On 08/08/2012 11:51 PM, Dan MacDonald wrote:

 I certainly prefer XFCE to GNOME 3 but XFCE still has a few rough
 edges and bugs 

 Yes, but a lot fewer bugs than LXDE! 
Yep - agreed on that one and its why I would suggest GMaq look
elsewhere for a desktop as AV Linux is fantastic otherwise.

PCManFM is not much use to me as it doesn't handle video thumbnails
like ROX filer does and thats one of the few reasons I open a GUI file
manager instead of just doinf everything from the terminal. rox is
also more mature and I've never come across a bug in it. My only
slight quibble is you can't copy files via right click but considering
thats my only gripe, its great!

...

  and Thunar is no longer the lightweight app it
once
 claimed to be. 

 I don't know how it used to be. Compared to Dolphin, it's much lighter. 
Which brings me onto my second point - I only consider there to be 2
desktops now. KDE if you have AT LEAST 1GB RAM (but really it needs
two to be comfortable) and you want a flashy desktop with most of the
features Win7 and OSX users expect. If you have 1GB RAM or less its
XFCE or a customised fluxbox/openbox/awesome desktop jobby like I've
done with rox.

Android has got the tablet and phone Linux GUI environment market all
sewn up so I don't see what GNOME 3 offers to anyone other than pain,
lack of respect for its users opinions (Hi Miguel, Mono and MS
sabotage!) and resource consumption.

...

  I use rox filer on my Pandaboard as it has a
comparable
 feature to Thunar but loads almost instantly compared to the 20s or so
 I can be waiting for Thunar to get its act together (this is running
 off a SSD via USB2). I can load dolphin in the same time it takes to
 load Thunar under fluxbox. 

 I use Thunar, it works for me. It's what XFCE uses to display its desktop. A
 friend who uses XFCE uses PCManFm and likes that.

 That 20s (or longer) Thunar load is due to a longstanding bug (either in
 Thunar or the underlying GNOME Virtual File System it uses). The workaround
 for that is to disable GVFS's automatic scanning of network shares. (Or do
 like I did: remove the GVFS module that does that. I mount file shares using
 fstab, so no need to have GVFS scan for network shares.) 
Thanks for the tip! I'll give Thunar another go with gvfs turned off
and maybe I'll return to that over ROX as Thunar does do automounting
of disks better than rox.