Re: Decent Starting Point For Rolling A Desktop Environment?

[Antonio Malcolm <antonio...@gmail.com>]

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That's odd- I've always experienced the opposite, ie: the proprietary 
Nvidia driver has typically worked for me, and the open source Nouveau 
driver has typically given me issues.
Also, I've always needed to do some finagling to get ATI drivers to work, 
but that's likely because I've typically installed my Linux rollouts on 
Apple laptops, and dealing with their combination of GMUX hardware/GPU 
hardware configuration and non-standard UEFI implemenation is a pain in the 
arse, and has required rolling a kernel (of course, it didn't help that I 
was running Debian, which uses an older kernel), and telling it where to 
find the Radeon BIOS. Add to that, on my 2011 MBP, vgaswitcheroo works, but 
something in the way MBP-specific GPU switching in the kernel extensions is 
written (and the code, written by some guys at Red Hat, looks like it was 
written a decade ago) causes the Radeon to crap out during subsequent 
power-cycling (works the first time, not on additional tries), so I ended 
up writing my own user-space utility for handling that.

From what I understand, the proprietary Nvidia drivers are better, 
especially performance-wise, than the proprietary ATI drivers, and, from 
dealing with both, I feel like Nvidia provide much more love to the Linux 
community than ATI. This may be partly because a lot of high-end animation 
and rendering workstations use Nvidia workstation-class GPUs for their 
crunching, and much of that software is either Linux-native, or comes with 
a Linux version (Maya immediately comes to mind), and Linux is used fairly 
often in those scenarios. Admittedly, that's a bit of speculation, on my 
part, but it's based on honest observation (I know folks in those 
industries, so I have that as a starting point, at least).

Anyhow, GPU support is one of the biggest pains in the arse I deal with 
during a Linux install.
However, there are definitely the other reasons I gave up on Cinnamon and 
went with Openbox and Compton. That Cinnamon overrides certain Xorg 
configs, and absorbs others in odd ways is the biggest. Conflicting with 
the GPU driver was sort of the last straw.

I was using Linux as a server/hosting OS, mostly, and OS X as my *Nix-based 
desktop. I got tired of the bloat and half-baked features, which, over the 
last few revisions have stepped on my feet more and more and more.
I want lean, I want out-of-my-way. I find KDE to be incredibly bloated, and 
both KDE and XFCE have wayyy too many settings panes/apps for my taste. 
Most of that is stuff I'd typically set in a config file somewhere, and 
touch maybe once in a blue moon- i.e., I don't really need a GUI for most 
of it. I don't particularly care for the look and feel of either LXDE or 
MATE, and I'll stay away from GNOME for the same reasons I dropped Cinnamon.
My current Openbox stack is doing a great job. It's easy enough to theme it 
the way I want, with lxappearance-obconf and the standard config files. It 
simply obeys those, it's lean, it's reliable, and it performs well.


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