I love fluxbox. I think it’s a great window manager, that does just the right thing. My preferred terminal application is rxvt (actually, urxvt these days). I probably spend 99% of my time using a terminal, running GNU screen. The applications I use the most are vim and irssi.
Every once in a while I try out Gnome and KDE. After a short period of RAM munching I usually end up running back to fluxbox. This time I’m trying out Gnome again, on an Ubuntu box.
For one, I can say that it feels a bit faster than it used to. I’m even running beagle, and I’m still able to use the system. That is a first, for me at least. But Gnome is still a far cry from fluxbox. The most annoying thing of all is that it keeps throwing out stupid little messages at me. Yesterday, for instance, an annoying thing jumped at me to inform me that “my battery is fully charged”. WHAT KIND OF UTTER STUPIDITY IS THAT? Do I care? Shouldn’t it be the laptop’s job to control my battery level? Why the hell to I have to get this? I know I can disable this somehow, but IIRC, Gnome claims to be about sane defaults..
Evolution has a way of just pissing on me as well. Constant pop-up messages. Funny, mutt never behaves like that. I guess that’s why mutt is usable, Evolution is not. And most importantly: why, why, why does my mail client handle my todo list? If somebody could do the whole world a huge favor and split this beast into seperate applications, this globe would be better place.
There are some really good Gnome apps though, the best ones being Tomboy and Muine. F-spot is slowly getting there. It’s neat, but there are some things I’d like to be able to do with it. The Ubuntu crowd screwed Nautilus and use the horrible browser mode lunacy by default. A few mouse clicks and you are back to the normal, useable spatial Nautilus, which is quite nice acutally.
The main difference between using fluxbox and Gnome is that in fluxbox you are busy using rxvt and vim, working away, whereas in Gnome you are using gnome-terminal and Gvim, constantly being interrupted by some stupid message dialog jumping right into your face and ruining your workflow. Nice touch.
