Date format in GNOME 40 panel clock

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 10 May 2021 at 16:30, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users
<ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> It's indeed way easier to put together the environment by yourself.
> For example chose a window manager such as I use, openbox and chose
> your favourite panel/s (for Liam likely xfce4-panel, for me a
> combination of lxpanel and fbpanel).
>
> I'm aware that Liam is in favour of a specific DE. I'm in favour of
> using no DE at all. While some DEs, such as the one favoured by
> Liam, aren't that bad, IMO it's still more pleasant to avoid any DE at
> all.

I've been using Linux for 25 years now, and *nix for about 32 or 33 --
although in the early days, the machines didn't have GUIs at all.

I've tried pretty much everything. Some I dislike, some I _really_
dislike, some are OK, some are mostly a pleasure.

Unity was mostly a pleasure.

Xfce is the "Best of the Rest". It does the stuff I want reasonably
well and it's only a bit clunky. Notably, it has the best
implementation of a vertical taskbar on *nix, although still clunky
compared to Windows.

LXDE and LXQt are OK. They do a vertical taskbar well, but it's not as
customisable as I'd like (or I can't find how to). LXQt still feels
unfinished to me.

Mate, Cinnamon and KDE can't do a working vertical taskbar at all.

All feel clunky next to Windows, mind you.

And Windows has always been clunky compared to classic MacOS -- even
Mac OS X is a bit clunky next to Classic. The Windows 95 Explorer was
a close match to the Mac System 7 Finder in abilities. System 8 added
a lot of nice stuff -- pop-up drawers, multithreaded operation and so
on -- without breaking the basic experience. Windows 95 OSR2 and
Windows 98 embedded Internet Explorer into the desktop (to avoid
getting sued and the company split up) and although the result is
multithreaded, it also was the point where the rot set in. Each
successive version of Windows has made the Explorer worse and worse,
more and more bloated. KDE copied that ugly bloated version of
Explorer from Win 98 and all the other Linux desktops followed it.

Acorn's RISC OS has a slicker, faster, more elegant desktop than even
the Mac, although it misses a lot of the nice little features of the
Mac and Windows desktops, even now. RISC OS is its own thing, owing
nothing to anyone else. I encourage everyone interested in desktop
design to try it. It's a work of art. It runs great on a $5 Raspberry
Pi Zero, or under RPCemu on Linux.

And BeOS had a very effective hybrid with the best of the Mac Finder
and the best of the Windows Explorer. Be open-sourced its desktop
before the company collapsed, so the Haiku Tracker is the original Be
code. It is also very well worth running Haiku on the bare metal on
real hardware and giving it a proper try for a couple of days.

Back to Linux: I also used to use CrunchBang on some machines, which
has no desktop as such, just a window manager and a window-switcher.
It is fine for some stuff but when it comes to mounting drives,
copying stuff, temporarily keeping a note or a file on the desktop,
small stuff like that, I just find it more convenient.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
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