[Tfug] Gnome usage

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Zack, Erich,

On 3/23/2014 1:55 AM, Zack Breckenridge wrote:
> I say it's not worth the hassle if you have to pull in all the dependencies
> manually. I usually keep Gnome installed if it's there by default, or else
> never install it, and use a "light weight" tiling window manager like dwm.

+1

I'm a big fan of a really *sparse* desktop.  I'm there to do work, not
look at slick wallpaper et ilk.  I prefer the uwm derivatives -- twm,
etc. and just bind the most common commands to menu entries.  The rest
I hammer out on the keyboard (as I spend most of my time writing
code/documentation, having to grab the mouse for damn near *anything*
is a needless complication -- keys leaving the keyboard means there is
a definite dip in "output".

> I'm not a big fan of complex GUIs anyway as I believe they tend to get in
> the way more than they help. Although this requires more CLI knowledge, I
> don't believe you have to be a command line super user to do basic tasks
> like watch movies (mplayer /path/to/movie).

I think it depends on what you expect from the machine.  I tend to keep
half a dozen or more xterms open (and their offspring) and use the
mouse primarily to shift focus.  But, I spend most of my time working
with text so being keyboard-centric makes sense (to me, YMMV).

It also is a big win in those times when the system won't boot to
multiuser, won't mount /usr/lib, etc. -- and you are *stuck* with
command line.  Are your man pages accessible from the root partition?
What do you do when /usr/{share,lib} isn't (yet) available?