Enhancing desktop; Visuals, tweaks and installed software.

[rygD]

along with otter-browser, which is a free and copyleft reincarnation of the good opera.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

 

[comradekingu]

http://distrowatch.com/images/slinks/evolve.pnglooks really nice. To have the desktop image in 1080 1:1 resolution makes sense. Also its less invasive and looks nice.

With auto-hide you get the whole screen available for programs.

There are many touch-centric interfaces, but i rather like the familiarity of something like this.

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, autohide works well with a mouse, but not good with a touchscreen

 

[txus]

No need for autohide (and besides, that way you loose the clock and status indicators, which I personally hate...). Just make everything fullscreen and integrate it with the window decoration!

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1459981#p1459981

 

[comradekingu]

I suppose thats the best option. The alternatives i can think of is hotkey to invoke top bar. Then you have the problem of "where did my menu go, how do i get it back"

But now you can toggle F11 to have fullscreen manually. No need to learn anything for basic functionality.

Edit: I suppose it depends what category of mouse-input is used. Touch, contious-contact stylus, or nubs. Nubs is more mouse-like.

Edit2:  With the 16:9 screen, it makes some sort of sense to have the top bar on the left. With just the icons that would be neat. Not ideal for the clock though.

 

[Grench]

Something missing on the Pandora user experience - how to do a right mouse click with the stylus?

 

[WizardStan]

how to do a right mouse click with the stylus?

Some apps were modified to use left-trigger (shift) as a touch screen modifier. There's really no reason we can't add it as a system wide feature, I think, just add it in the mouse settings somewhere, same as the "window drag" modifier.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

looks really nice. To have the desktop image in 1080 1:1 resolution makes sense. Also its less invasive and looks nice.

With auto-hide you get the whole screen available for programs.

There are many touch-centric interfaces, but i rather like the familiarity of something like this.

I don't really like the way that looks at all. I like XFCE the way it is now. Or CDE, or LXDE. That thing reminds me of Windows too much.

 

[Kev2442]

This list looks nice, though I don't know if we should pack everything as built-in.

Maybe just the lightest and the best.

What do the striked ones mean ? Does that mean they are already included ?

We should add Inkscape as well.

For the games, a good open-source game I know of is Warsow. If someone feels up to porting it over though.

 

[comradekingu]

Inkscape is a sort of professional use-case, and it is quite hostile if you use it for the first time.

Warsow is a very nice game, but also quite big and an fps, those generally are worse with the kind of input there is.

I just completed the translation of Xfce to Norwegian bokmål. With 4.12 coming out in a week, it looks to be good, and it is the true and trusted option.  LXQT is the contender, ED likes it, and its promising because its a bit lighter.

Something that could add a bit of familiarity to the desktop is a nice background, possibly a bootsplash and login screen, and maybe an (alternative) sound-theme.

 

[equex]

Lets try to gage interest and find something nice.


The act of fixing little things that are seemingly irrelevant and not obviously broken for the greater good of visuals that are uniform and make sense.


Done right its beautiful, done wrong it looks actively ugly.


This process starts at the ordering and information stage,continues with out of the box experience. And finally, and most importantly, the little improvements to make the device pleasant to use.

OS:Debian jessie 8.0  with

DE: Xfce 4.10 or 11. Everyone can help translate Xfce to their language now https://www.transifex.com/organization/xfce/dashboard


     Moonlight or Lxqt  possibly LXDE  These are qt(5) rather than gtk+ based

etc...

 

DE: XFCE please, also XFCE devs are quite unforgiving on supporting older releases. It has many ligthweigth apps written for it. (i generally prefer gtk+ apps for lightweight)

 

Image viewer: How about Risretto instead of PIV ?

Image manipulation: Yup, mtpaint (gtk+) is nice,small dev-minded pixel tool! Also RGBpaint is really small and fast, kind of like MSPaint. Kolourpaint is a bit bigger, looks a bit more like Paint.NET.

 

Video editor: Is this the right platform to edit videos on ? It requires a lot of motherboard troughput, not to mention CPU/RAM.

 

File manager: I actually prefer Nautilus over Thunar, it has more tools/app support made for it too.

Terminal emulator: I'd just use Terminal from XFCE. It has multitab and a usable GUI. But if we're doing KDE runtimes, let's do Konsole!

Editor: I prefer SciTe over Mousepad. They are abut the same size and speed, and SciTe is the better dev editor and also has project plugin.


Development: Codeblocks is nice but quite heavy, may I suggest to add Kate as an option? That's real good as a IDE/project manager with sessions and plugins.

 


Office suite: I think that all the office suites are too big! Also, they can not usually not be removed without removing the entire desktop ecosystem. Please make this optional. 

Spreadsheet program: GNUmeric?

 

More dev tools: Lybniz (graph plot tool), GTHhash (checksum app), Bless (hexeditor), Meld(merge tool), Kompare(diff tool), SVN Workbench and SQLite Database Browser?

More accessories: BleachBit (essentially CCleaner for Linux), Filelight (diskspace analyzer), KeePass2/KeePassX  (password manager, former uses Mono libraries. Needs the xdotool package  also.), GNUPG with KGPG (PGP functions from context menu, think it works in Nautilus out of the box)

More network: kVIRC (IRC client), putty, gFTP, Electrum Bitcoin client (lightweigth, does not download the blockchain), Pan ( newsreader) , SecPanel 

 

Edit:

Console network tools: screen/screenie (console multiplexer)

Console compression tools: lhasa lzip lzop ncompress rzip sharutils unace unalz unrar p7zip-rar zoo ziprecover plzip

 

Also, an out-of-the box working Samba browser client to connect to Windows shares with would be killer. (practical to copy ROM's and other media with real quick)


 


My 2 cents !

 

[TrashyMG]

I think the default OS image should be fairly light, just with essentials and maybe a few convenient applications. The rest of is just a "sudo apt-get install" away. If I had all that pre-installed, I'd spent a lot of time un-installing the bloat.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Yeah, I vote for a barebone system

 

[slaeshjag]

Relatively light-weight with meta packages for useful software is probably the way to go. 

 

[_jr_]

Including much more than on the Pandora is just a waste of time. The normal users will be content downloading games and complaining that Android is not working (while ranting on about how keyboard less devices are much better). The rest can just install everything they need.

 

[zonova]

Personally, I would appreciate an environment that managed to look pretty. Keep in mind, however, that pretty doesn't mean simplified. I want full access and customizability obviously, but having a desktop enviroment that didn't look like it was from 25 years ago would be pretty nice. Thankfully, linux distros have progressed quite a bit and now it is not difficult to find a distro that is very lightweight while also accesible and good looking.

Also, personal preferrence, we should force everyone to use Vim(kidding... sort of).

About the earlier conversation concerning a case and a charger. I think the device Must come with a charger, considering its price. The package should be as complete as possible, so a sleek OS, a well made device, and a charger are sort of part and parcel of that(in my mind). The big metal case thing... eh, I think that ED could sell his own personalized one as optional with the device, but I certainly don't think it should be mandatory. I do understand keeping cardboard boxes for sentimental value even though they become useless, so I see why one might want a case that coninues to be useful even after you have opened it. However, since it is a portable device, i never invision myself using such a thing and so I am quite ok with saving the money and going for a cheap cardboard case. Though, if we did make the packaging more fancy, that would certainly be nice, though not necessary in the slightest.

 

[Glyph Reader]

You know, while I think XFCE would be the best choice (especially since the 4.12 update), I can't help but wonder what KDE Plasma 5 would be like on the Pyra. 

-Glyph Reader

 

[EvilDragon]

KDE4 works well on the Pyra. About as fast as XFCE4 on the Pandora. Haven't tried Plasma5 yet, but should probably be similar.

 

[rygD]

I was just reading through recent posts and feel that a drop down terminal might be a nice touch.  If we get Xfce the default terminal supposedly has this as an option, so I would be fine with that.  (Does anyone use a drop down terminal on their Pandora?)

I am with those that say keep it lightweight, and let the user add what they want.  Feel free to make a convenient little list of recommended software that comes up as part of the first boot process that you can opt in on.  Many of us already know what we will use, the rest can get stuff from the list if they want.

 

[levi]

Looking at the list of packages I've manually installed to my arch laptop, if I dismiss the bits and pieces I used to get XFCE installed, and XFCE itself, I'm pretty much left with stuff that should probably be installed via packages; web browser, mail client, mplayer.  Perhaps the PDF reader packages should be installed as default, especially if the quick start guide comes in that format again, and git should probably be installed since it's tiny and some source is stored on github.  I don't see anything that falls between those two stalls of installed by default, and installable as a package post install, although perhaps we should help people download a web browser on first boot.

I wonder if firefox etc. will be a PND-type package again, or we'll rely on iceweasel on the Pyra's debian setup?