Cinnamon 1.4.0

[Richmond]

On 30/01/13 17:27, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> Just put in xfce for someone.  Did the upgrade to Debian Testing, which is
> fairly safe at this point, and there was Gnome3.  One look and a short play
> was enough.
>
> 'You may not be real happy about this'
> 'No I definitely am not!'
>
> Then we put in xfce, which is fine, except that the filenames on the desktop
> are abbreviated

The file names are only abbreviated if they are socking great long ones; and
a simple mouseOver allows them to be read in their full nausea.

> and there are no desktop icons

Sound unlike the XFCE I "know and have come to love".

>   and all the old backup files
> now appear again from Gnome, which they were marked invisible and hidden
> before.  This is in the Debian testing version at least.  Also when you move
> files around sometimes they get copied when you wanted to move them.  Better
> but not quite right still.
>
> Turns out however you can replicate the Gnome 2 experience if you set up to
> run xfce as the desktop, but have it use nautilus as the file manager, by
> using gnome-tweak-tool.
>
> After all that, and a user staring at the screen a few times in horrified
> disbelief, and a few hours tweaking, we are more or less back to where we
> left off before the Gnome people went off the rails.  No, its not touch
> screen, no its not a tablet, but its a desktop like we all know and love,
> and it just works.
>
> The only thing I have to figure out now is why the text under the desktop
> icons is unchangeably in black, thus forcing a light desktop background.  Oh
> well, there is probably a way.

Well, here's naive "install it and get on with things Richmond":

Over the last couple of weeks I have installed UbuntuStudio 12.10 onto 3 
machines;

XFCE 4.10 'does' the old WIMP GUI with nary a backward glance as far as 
I am concerned

(And, Peter, I always have a dark, slightly textured background to my 
desktop: icon labels are
black with white surrounds)

the only 'grunt' is that Avant Window Navigator has been dropped from 
the Ubuntu depositories;
however, as always with Linux (unlike some other operating systems . . . 
cough, cough) there's a way
round this sort of thing that one can find with a simple web search.

My feelings about MATE and Cinnamon are that they are OK-ish as pale 
copies of GNOME 2, but
XFCE 4.10 does it better.

UbuntuStudio boots into its ever-so-slightly hacked version of XFCE 4.10 
and, from my point of view, the
only real 'down' is uninstalling half the "Media Centre" junk it 
populates the menus with as if we are
all would be Kraftwerk clones.

And, lest we forget that this is really fairly OT where this is being 
discussed, Livecode sits very nicely
there.

I hope you have lobbed your bawbees at the Kickstart thing (I have) as I 
have a serious fantasy
(and have had for quite sometime now) of a computer running an Open 
Source OS with GIMP,
Audacity, Fontforge and Open Source Livecode.

Richmond.