There was one post this past week that got a handful of comments, so I will repost most of those.
Reader
Mike Frett shared, "That's why I use XFCE, very customizable. I don't particularly like
Unity, but I enjoyed the article. Incidentally, you could have turned
the Opacity down a bit on your Dock to match Unity's. I use
Xubuntu, when I do I always delete the Dock on the bottom and drag the
top bar down to the bottom. I add some spacers and launchers and such
till it looks like *that* classic OS from around '98. It's just my
preference because it's simple and stays out of my way. I use the
Shiki-Brave and Classic Ambiance themes. Nothing in my System
Tray on the right except the clock, weather update and Network Monitor
(Bars only). And Dots style separators. I like it =p Point is, it's very
customizable to anyone’s liking. But it annoys me they still call XFCE a
'light' WM when it's resource usage is the same as Gnome 3 and KDE; and
they STILL don't have even basic effect's like fade-in and out or
Min-Max animations."
Commenter
Morten Juhl-Johansen Zőlde-Fejér had this bit of support: "This is an excellent documentation of the level of customization that is
possible. I seem to recall another site where they did a Vista and
MacOS X redesign - it was quite impressive."
An anonymous reader said, "Unity's screen layout is actually OK. But if Unity was just a
reorganization of an on-screen dock and panel, then it wouldn't have
generated so much controversy. Canonical eliminated the start
menu, replacing it with a cumbersome search function; they also adopted
the Mac's one-menubar-for-all-programs style, took away many
customization options, and put all of that in a package that requires
high-end graphics capability to even run. I don't know why anyone would
want to emulate any of that. With Xfce, you can put a launcher in
the dock that opens the "application finder", which is a nicely laid
out menu of installed programs, organized by program type (graphics,
internet, etc.). Alternatively, the launcher could run "thunar
/usr/share/applications", which would produce a very Mac-like display of
clickable icons of all installed applications. I imagine one could do
this with Unity, in effect restoring the start menu (but I haven't tried
- Xfce works just fine). And I still haven't found a simpler way
to switch desktops than Xfce's trick of just moving the mouse off the
right or left screen edge. No mouse clicks at all! Gnome 2.x had the
same thing, I think; gone the way of the Dodo bird..."
Another anonymous commenter countered, "I'm with Innocent Bystander. I switched to Xfce 3 years mainly to get
away from what I saw coming down the pike with GNOME 3 and Unity. While
it's interesting to know that this can be done with Xfce, this article
begs the question: WHY would anyone in his/her right mind WANT to do
this? As someone who likes Xfce the way it is due to the Xfce team
sticking to tried and true intuitive GUI design that has stood the test
of time, I consider this article to be completely and utterly pointless."
Thanks to all those who commented on that post. I'm back on campus, but because my UROP (and graduate school preparations) are a bit less hectic than the normal semester, I'll probably be able to put out a review this week. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!
