Desktop <not a tech question, opinion question>

[silver.bullet at zoho.com]

On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 13:28:31 -0400, Scott Blair wrote:
>I am running Ubuntu 14.04. I'm kind of bored with the desktop. I was 
>thinking of switching to a different one. Any suggestions?

Hi,

what to suggest depends to your needs and work-flow.

Instead of running a desktop environment I prefer a window manager
without a desktop environment.

You could test jwm and openbox. I prefer openbox over jwm and my
preferred panels are fbpanel and lxpanel.

By default jwm has a nice panel included, but you also could use
another panel for jwm too.

The clearly best terminal emulation is roxterm, what ever desktop
environment or window manager you'll use.

File managers are a matter of taste, my recommendation are spacefm and
rodent, while AFAIK rodent is not available by the repositories, but by
a DEB package provided by upstream.

Pluma and sublime text are nice editors.

If you wish to use a desktop environment, you perhaps should test Xfce4.

I dislike KDE, GNOME and it's forks Cinnamon and Mate, but Mate at least
provides nice applications, such as pluma and engrampa. Btw Xfce4's
xfce4-power-manager and xfce4-appfinder are nice for usage with window
mangers too.

You could take a look at Razor and LXDE, they aren't my taste, but
other users like them.

What desktop environment are you using at the moment and what do you
dislike of that desktop environment? It's easier to recommend another DE
or a WM, if you would answer this question.

Do you have already a few apps you won't miss? You should mention them.
They might be based on GTK or Qt and that might have impact to the DE
or WM to recommend.

Are you a terminal user or do you prefer to e.g. use file managers over
a terminal? Features such as automount comes to mind. You might want it
or you hate it etc..

Some users love Enlightenment, I hate it.

Some users like tiling window managers, such as ion and awsome,
depending to your needs, thy might be a good solution.

Resume

To recommend DEs and/or WMs and apps you need to provide more
information about your work-flow and how experienced you are with using
Linux.

Regards,
Ralf