Simplicity vs. Eye Candy

Do you prefer a simple desktop or do you prefer eye-candy?

  • Simplicity and functionality for me!

    Votes: 49 53.8%

  • Give me eye-candy!

    Votes: 32 35.2%

  • All I need is a command-line!

    Votes: 10 11.0%
  • Total voters
    91
I

Ion Silverbolt

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 17, 2004
Messages
339
Everything seems to be trending to more and more unnecessary bloat in Linux. Don't get me wrong, I think compiz and all the other pretty stuff is great for Linux, but am I the only one who is starting to find all the pretty stuff annoying?

Take kde for example. I loved kde3.5, but kde4 is a turd. I have tried it in different distros and there is always something buggy about it, or it lacks a configuring option that used to be available in kde3.5. It's like they spent more time trying to beautify it than to make it more functional.

A lot of distros are also enabling compiz by default. Is it really necessary to have all the flashy stuff enabled to compete with Windows?

Me personally, I'm loving Xfce4 as an alternative to kde4. I have avoided it in the past, but It has improved a lot since I tried it a couple years ago. I am really enjoying the simplicity and functionality of it.

Maybe I'm just a fossil though. I mean I am practically lost in Vista too. All the pretty colors, and god forbid I try to find something that used to be easy to find in XP. This is coming from a Gentoo user. lol

At least we have a lot of choice on Linux. Though, the easier distros are leaning toward the bloat factor IMO. Even xubuntu has a lot of gnome stuff tossed in that slows it down.
 
I wish there was a "best of both worlds" option because I think XFCE can be beautiful and it a fairly simple WM with little bloat.

I prefer Gnome over KDE, but XFCE is my choice over anything.
 
I really like KDE for the flashiness, but Gnome serves me just fine on whatever flavor of linux I end up going with.
 
Not all eyecandy is meaningless, though. I moved to KDE4 recently, since it seems to have stabilized. The most useful feature: The nice exposé clone in kwin4. Quite trivial to set up, too - very KDE.
 
Hmmmm when it comes to Linux... simple and functional is what I expect... so I prefer that.
 
Gnome with xfwm4 instead of Metacity/Compiz for me. Compiz was just too bloaty and has major performance problems with running out of video RAM (my Thinkpad R61 uses the Quadro NVS140M, which only has 128MB)...I tried going back to Metacity, but I found I just couldn't live without transparency. I do find myself wishing that xfwm4 had some animations, but that's clearly just going to end up down the same road as Compiz.

I still reckon that Gnome is the best compromise - XFCE is too limited (eg non-network aware file browser in this day and age? C'mon...), and KDE has too much in the way for configurable options. I always used to use it, but found that I'd spend more time fiddling with it than actually doing work. This was right around the time I found Ubuntu, and ended up just using Gnome because it insulated me from the temptation to muck about, yet allowed me to get the job done.
 
Like you said, you can tailor it to how you like it. I prefer not to have eye candy, so I don't. Easy as that.
 
That's the absolute best thing about Linux. Choice. It's so flexible that you can do anything with it.
 
For a while I was a total compiz + eyecandy junkie. I wanted it to look cool.
but, now, I prefer the minimalistic setup. I hate compiz and the cube and all that stuff. Gnome + white theme + simple background =win
 
Another vote for simplicity here. Used fluxbox for a while, but a few months ago I switched over to xfce and dont see that changing any time soon.
 
CLI is all I need. I tried Compiz Fusion and all that jazz some time ago and it seemed cool for the 1st day at most and then it was fairly useless. It's cool when someone comes over to your desk and you throw the cube up in their face but beyond that it was buggy, crashed more than a lot, & took up a ass load of resources. I would think they could minimize the load or at least get the stability factor down by now. It's been out for some time now. I like plain old Gnome if I need anything.
 
Really, I don't get the trend towards complexity. I understand computers are more powerful and memory is aplenty, but it seems like all the flashy stuff only gets in the way.

I like that I can cold boot into an xfce desktop on my netbook in less than 30 seconds and only be using like 70 megs of RAM. And for whatever reason, I can launch firefox like 3 seconds faster on it than on my Dad's new Dual Core Athlon laptop with Windows 7 on it. And it has a faster hard drive.
 
I have never tried XFCE. Might be interesting. Do I still need GDM or some kind of manager to handle XFCE like Gnome requires GDM?
 
Is both really too much to ask for? Something that is simple, functional, but at the same time, elegant, and well-suited to the technology that it uses for visual effects?
 
The problem with Eye Candy is what looks like a beautiful piece of artwork to one, looks like an eye sort to another. For me, give me simplicity and the ability to customize to develop my personal Eye Candy.
 
Mr. Pedantic said:
Is both really too much to ask for? Something that is simple, functional, but at the same time, elegant, and well-suited to the technology that it uses for visual effects?
Click to expand...

Not at all. Really the simplicity vs eye candy argument is a preference, not a complaint. I love that we have so much choice in linux.

I very much loved kde3.5 and had a great balance of ease of use and tricked out eye candy. I have a few screenies in the screenshot thread that look pretty good.

Kde 4 went too far the other way though. It's like they worked hard to make it pretty, while leaving some useful features undeveloped. Then there is some lingering bugs that annoyed me away from kde entirely. That's what led me to xfce.

xfce isn't quite as nice as kde3.5 IMO, but it's very zippy and uses little resources. Thunar takes some getting used to, but I am finding it has some nice features once you get used to it.
 
xfce can look decent with a bit of work and still use little resources. Here is my netbook booted up. Only 72 megs of RAM used. Firefox all by itself uses 55 megs. lol

Screenshot-3.png
 
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I don't think I could live without xmonad anymore. I used to be all about compiz (or beryl back then) when I first started.
 
In Windows I find even XP to be a little bit bloated interface-wise. I started out by disabling themes and such, but I've gone a step further. I replaced my Explorer shell with bbLean (basically just a distro of BlackBox 4 Widows) which is a far more efficient lighter shell. It's a bit more minimal on its own with the way it handles the start menu and etc (though you can customize to add more. I have very little added though.) In fact, I don't even have that plugin that draws the desktop. It's just a black solid color (no wallpaper even. I've never found one that quite suits me.) The theme I'm using is very thin and minimal too. For example, window borders are only 1px wide now and title bars/etc are also extremely small with a small font. This gives me plenty of screen real estate. I've since found that I am truly grateful I had all this already setup when I got an EeePC and found screen real estate to be truly limited...

In linux, I used to prefer KDE back before it turned into a bloated mess. I found it to be lighter and more efficient than GNOME despite the fact that it seemed to be oriented somewhat towards emulating the Windows look and feel. Now I find KDE to be exactly as bad as GNOME however and even that has gotten worse than it used to be. For my server system I wanted something more minimal and picked Xubuntu of the big three Ubuntu variants. After playing around with Xfce4 for a bit, I'm now thinking that the next time I put linux on my desktop, I'll be using it instead. It's SO much cleaner and more efficient without throwing away everything like, say, IceWM seems to do (at least, what little I could do with it to even tell, lol.) Ironically, I did try FluxBox for a bit, but just couldn't seem to get it right somehow. It didn't help that I couldn't find any way to migrate the full menus over from KDE to it though. Really I wish I could just copy my configuration (particularly theme) from my bbLean setup, but it seems to be just different enough that I couldn't get that to work right.

Anyway, my vote is for clean simplicity and efficiency without going too far. I do think some people think the more necessary parts of a GUI are eye candy if it is still technically possible to get by at all without them...
 
I like a bit, but yea they're really going overboard. ALL the OSes need more function, less bloaty eye candy crap.
 
why can't we have simple eye candy? i like simplicity, but if it looks like windows 3.1, forget it.
 
berky said:
why can't we have simple eye candy? i like simplicity, but if it looks like windows 3.1, forget it.
Click to expand...

Heh, this is where the MacOS 9 fans should show up. :)
(And the BeOS fanatics, all four of us.)

Anyway, there's also "technically complicated but visually understated", like you can do with compositing: A touch of drop shadows, an exposé clone for finding windows, perhaps some carefully used semitransparency. Animating window behaviour (e.g having minimized windows shrink down to the task bar instead of just vanishing) would probably also fall into that.

In other words, carefully used eye candy doesn't have to be distracting or productivity-decreasing; it can equally well be used to provide useful functionality or subtle hints.
 
I have been meaning to try Openbox. I can't understand its place in the mix. Does it replace Gnome / KDE as a 'desktop environment' or is it a Window Manager that replaces GTK2 and sits on top of Gnome?
 
Carloswill said:
I have been meaning to try Openbox. I can't understand its place in the mix. Does it replace Gnome / KDE as a 'desktop environment' or is it a Window Manager that replaces GTK2 and sits on top of Gnome?
Click to expand...

It's a window manager and a program launcher, essentially. You could drop gnome/KDE entirely, or just replace its window manager.

Oh, and GTK2 is a toolkit - you're thinking about metacity (It's the same relation as Qt vs kwin on the KDE side.)
 
So you're saying I can use Openbox in place of Gnome completely. That sounds very interesting...just picked up a Netbook so I would like to try this.
 
Carloswill said:
So you're saying I can use Openbox in place of Gnome completely. That sounds very interesting...just picked up a Netbook so I would like to try this.
Click to expand...

That's what it's for, yes.
Mind you, it's a comparably sparse environment: It doesn't provide much more than a window manager and a way to start / swap between programs.
 
My tolerance for bloat depends entirely on the purpose of the installation and on the processing power of the machine.

On my netbook I run UNR 9.10 stripped down and customized, with only a static switcher and a few basic but functional panel applets. It boots quickly (not that I really need to reboot it!), runs smoothly, loads things fairly quickly and gives me over over 3hr battery life on a 3 cell battery, with the screen ON the whole time.

For a desktop with a broader use like music and video playback, more-than-casual browsing etc, I see nothing but benefit to the functional bits of Compiz like the exposé clone and ADD helper, or simple drop shadows/other "you're in this window" notifiers.

The bottom line for me is if the system has the otherwise unused processing power to utilize these featres, I see no reason to restrict myself.
 
Simplicity and functionality for me! I almost clicked 'command line', but its nice to have a few terminals open at once. (Although screen works well if you get a good config file.) I just like having a nice snappy system, so Gentoo + XFCE4 work for me. Simplicity is also nice when using aging hardware (no, sig is not out of date!) I rarely notice slowness on this comp - only stuff like modern 3d games and HD video is sometimes laggy. Quite frankly, its much snappier than the Mac Pro (2x Xeon Dual-Cores) I have at work. I don't even think I've seen an hourglass or 'spinning rainbow wheel of death' on my linux box.

'choice is good'++
 
A very slight amount of eyecandy can enhance usability, but it's very easy to go overboard.

A very quick fade-in when you open a menu, a very quick swish down for minimizing; things like that smooth out the UI without slowing the user down.

The long and drawn-out effects like flaming windows that you often see with systems like Compiz are simply too much. There's a good reason you don't see effects like that in Windows and OSX; both Microsoft and Apple run extensive usability studies, and those types of effects don't test well in the long run. They're cool at first, but eventually you just want to get the effect over-with so you can start working again.
 
Ok, I took the challenge and posted this with lynx. Painful.
Interestingly, main site won't come up as "you have ad-blocking
turned on". Uh, not really!
 
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