Goodbye Gnome

It's official, Gnome sucks. I finally had enough with bloody Nautilus crashing every 5 minutes. And I haven't used famd in years, which Nautilus seems to ever increasingly want. I don't even use an automounter, why in the hell would I want to have famd running and sucking cpu cycles everytime a file changes?

So I've switched to XFCE. All I need is a taskbar, window pager, and a couple of applets (plugins in XFCE). Well, that and my beloved Gkrellm2 monitor. So far, I've been impressed. Pretty easy to configure, and it uses gtk2 engines, so I can use the themes I like with Gnome. (Spent an afternoon tweaking Gkrellm and gtk2 themes to my liking too, even though it was a lot of guess work.) Unlike Gnome, it also comes with a very handy Menu Editor, which frontends an xml file that contains your custom menu config. Now I can just right click the desktop and get a drop down with all my favorite apps, as well as the whole system menu. I should be using this for a while.

Or at least until Enlightenment's R17 gets released. That just looks pretty as hell, and uses the latest X11 libraries (glitz, cairo) that make use of your video card's GPU for rendering. That means drop shadows and alpha blending galore!

I didn't want to go with KDE (bloat, bloat, bloat), and the *box's would require too much config, and stuff like the slit just wouldn't get any use from me. Like I said, I don't need much from my window manager, just a taskbar and an easy menu. Call me old skool I guess...