Of Linus, KDE, and mouse buttons

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org>

| Most people I know who have lives have better things to do with their
| time than having to evaluate different desktop choices. The platform is,
| for most people, a means rather than an end; their efforts are best
| spent mastering applications.

Normally I like to control my environment.  Perhaps too much.

In the case of desktop environments, I've found the choices so
unexciting and the victories so ephemeral, that I've abdicated.  I use
whatever was handed me by the distro.

My main GUI application is xterm.  I'm not even willing to accept
substitutes since all that I've tried have been missing xterm
features that I'm accustomed to.  My text editing, mail reading,
downloading, and general administration are done within xterm.

I'm *not* proud of this.  I'd like someone to give me a Royal Road to
rewarding GUI usage.  I've just found that succeeding desktops have
not made my life much better and effort expended exploring them has
not paid off.  Almost all advances in my GUI experiences over the last
25 years can be ascribed to improvement in hardware:
- screen size(640x400 => 2560x1600),
- video controller capability (1b/p => 32b/p, lots faster),
- CPU speed (8MHz => 2000MHz x 2),
- RAM capacity (1MiB => 3GiB))

I'd actually love a someone to explain to me why I should care.  I'd
like to find out about some GUI facilities that would improve my life
significantly.  Oh, and I'd like these features to have some
longevity.

Here's a list of GUI things that I actually use a lot.  Roughly
ordered by most used to least used.

- xterm (not that new).  True, this is a way out of the GUI, but the
  ability to run a lot of xterms and switch between them is a benefit
  of the desktop environment.

- firefox.  In some sense this is a meta-application.
  I'm not counting the many applications made available through
  firefox (eg. google) as separate.

- PDF viewers (evince or acrobat reader (now Adobe Reader, I think))

- mplayer

- xchat, pigeon

- Open Office (mostly as a reader, but sometimes as a writer)

What am I missing out on?


Apropos the original topic: my mouse happens to have extra buttons all
over, kind of like warts (five of them).  I haven't even bothered to
figure out how to get them to do anything interesting.  Another
hardware advance squandered by software people :-)
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