Troy

What’s the weirdest one you’ve tried? Most challenging? Have you found any really cool defining features in any distro?

For example GoboLinux and NixOS eschew the Linux file hierarchy standard (FHS), and that becomes their defining feature. But many other distros have some other defining feature. Slackware uses tarballs as package management and oldschool init. LFS has you build from nothing. Etc.

meow

Oh hi, this is me too. Since 1.0alpha ;)

The list is great! But it doesn’t really tell us which ones are actively developed. Running historical DEs is fun sometimes. For example, LXDE doesn’t really see a lot of development compared to its successor, LXQt. But once again shows the the Arch Wiki is the best ;)

I guess people do occasionally compile KDE 1.x just to see if it still runs on modern systems (it does, but obviously some underlying things have changed over the years, like the audio and graphics stacks). But that isn’t the same as being actively developed :)

Someone enlighten me. How many active desktop projects are there currently? (Not just window managers…)

KDE Plasma, Trinity (is it active? Fork of KDE 3.5)

Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon (fork all the things!), or “reskins” like Unity or Budgie?

LXQt, Xfce… Is enlightenment still active as a project?

Does anyone use Deepin – appears to be a partial fork of KDE (kwin, etc.) with new desktop environment built around it rather than use Plasma.

Or Pantheon (Vala+GTK3?).

Cosmic is from the ground up, recent and active I guess.

Missing anything?

All I’m hearing is complaining. It’s open source. Fix mate then so it does what you want.

Well, that’s on mate then. In KDE you could remap to a combo of your choice with ease

I don’t use mate, but assuming that it has a file manager and that file manager has hotkeys that conform to the muscle memory that is built using other file managers… Try it and see what happens?

Shift-del

LKML and patch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=0fc810ae3ae110f9e2fcccce80fc8c8d62f97907

He cites his work as being a variant of a patch submitted by another developer, Josh Poimboeuf. It’s a team effort folks :)

It’s really rare for a project to completely rewrite to a new toolkit. VLC in circa 2007 did it (moved to Qt - even stole their volume control widget directly from Amarok at the time). GCompris ended up as a KDE project despite originating in Gnome (along with toolkit change, but it weirdly kept the name). LXDE->LXQT also. But I don’t actually have that many examples.

But you mean you wrote it in python with tkinter as a toolkit, rather than writing it in Tcl (which is its own language, like python).

Serious question: I’ve never met a programmer who has ever actually written anything in Tcl in the real world. If you’ve working in Tcl, tell me about it! What did you use it for and when? Was it awesome/terrible/etc.?

Forward slash doesn’t throw a mental syntax error? ;)

Well, you kind of can actually. It just replaces KWin

This sounds like the sort of infrastructure project the Linux Foundation should be supporting.

Linux on all their electric cars, and they’re watching porn while driving ;)