Making Studio work with more than one DE

[Len Ovens]

On Thu, May 23, 2013 11:35 am, lukefromdc at hushmail.com wrote:
> Surely there are more people who want to make US work with any
> particular desktop than there are desktops!  I did the Cinnamon work
> myself
> for the legacy desktop, simply so I could use it Have all the necessary
> files to
> make it work. Only hassle is that the Cinnamon menus for some reason
> ignore the
> UbuntuStudio A/V submenus, instead putting all the A/V apps into "sound
> and video"
> no matter what you do in the menu editor.

That is what I have been working on as happens. The Studio custom A/V
menus are right now specific to xfce. I am working to break the Studio
menu into three parts. The stock menu that the DE comes with, a static (I
hope) studio specific base menu to hold everything in and the A/V block.
This is what has lead me to start looking at various DEs to see what my
mods are going to do to them. It is why I want to know what makes KDE, KDE
to the user. What makes gnome shell what someone wants to use.

I could set KDE up to look not much different from xfce does and gnome2
did, but why? I can set up KDE to list apps and launch them in at least 5
different ways... there are at least two more methods of just launching
using a search method or a run box as well. Then there is the whole
activities setup which could be very useful in setting up workflows if
used right. It could also be a big fail if used in the wrong manner.

lxde, is going to be the most like xfce, in fact lubuntu uses quite a lot
of xfce utilities in the background. The menu will likely be almost
identical. It would probably be the easiest DE to include, the challenge
would be to actually keep it "light". Just starting kdenlive for example,
starts a lot of KDE background tasks... and those tasks don't go away just
because kdenlive is closed.

So there may in fact be a DE that is best suited to any one workflow. That
is, someone doing a video workflow may find that xfce is not the best DE
to use and that the programs they are using run better and more reliably
on something else. There are things missing in xfce like colour
correction, that KDE has, gnome has, unity has.

The goal is to make any app work well with any DE. However, depending on
the user's HW and the apps used that may not be possible or even testable.
We can only test on the machines we have and people with a high interest
in one kind of creation tend to buy machines that work best there. I buy
looking for low latency in the MB and the ability to work with my audio
card or an audio card I am interested in, the most basic video card is
fine. Someone in visual creation will be looking at monitors, stylus pads,
and graphic cards, audio may only be for entertainment for them.

Anyway, assuming Cinnamon uses the gnome menu style of old, it should be
easy to add in the A/V menu overlay with that DE too. (easy doesn't mean
no work :)




-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net