Post Your Desktop

[klikklak]

well I have a good streak of talking out of my arse today, so I'll continue.

Regarding ATI, yes they're steadily improving. Eyefinity support came just a week or two ago and there's more to come in the next revision of their binary blob. As far as I remember they DO support Xrandr, which is key for rotating screens. But I have no experience of this, since I haven't bought their card yet and I need to buy a third screen too. The good part is that even cheap displayport screens support pivot.

Open source drivers support 4000 series (r600 was it?), but 5000 series (r800? can't remember) is still to come.

From reading phoronix the general opinion seems to be that nvidia drivers have better 3D acceleration currently and are very stable, but ati is improving, they have an open source strategy so it's the future-proof choice.

I certainly will get one 'soon', I'd love to have both compiz/kwin effects and 3 screens. Fitting more of them on the table would be a problem though.

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

well I have a good streak of talking out of my arse today, so I'll continue.

Regarding ATI, yes they're steadily improving. Eyefinity support came just a week or two ago and there's more to come in the next revision of their binary blob. As far as I remember they DO support Xrandr, which is key for rotating screens. But I have no experience of this, since I haven't bought their card yet and I need to buy a third screen too. The good part is that even cheap displayport screens support pivot.

Open source drivers support 4000 series (r600 was it?), but 5000 series (r800? can't remember) is still to come.

From reading phoronix the general opinion seems to be that nvidia drivers have better 3D acceleration currently and are very stable, but ati is improving, they have an open source strategy so it's the future-proof choice.

I certainly will get one 'soon', I'd love to have both compiz/kwin effects and 3 screens. Fitting more of them on the table would be a problem though.

I think I'll just wait for a while and see how things pan out. I do use kubuntu on my EEE PC 900 though, and I have to say it's quite nice.

 

[dnlgreenwood]

First... Windows 7 Ultimate:


edit: I cleaned it up a bit. This is how I like my desktop organized, and I wish windows did that automatically so I wouldn't have to keep dragging things around.

Another way I organize them is by keeping them in an arch over the top, and if I accumulate a lot of files, an arch on the bottom, creating a circle. I think its easier to find things if they are spread around, not clustered at the side.


I took that picture myself btw... I think its perfect because it isn't too dark or too light for a desktop picture, isn't too constant in colour, and I can see the white text that I can't figure out how to change but want to change. I try to keep it organized into folders, but then this happens two days later. 


I disabled all of the fancy visual effects, including aero, for increased performance. (it works)
My computer is only an HP Mini with a 1.59GHz Intel Atom processor with 1GB of RAM. (MAX is 2GB) Surprisingly, its faster than my desktop and actually runs 3D games without any crashing or display glitches due to defective RAM that my desktop computer has. I just have to move the RAM to different slots (2x1GB) every week. The worst Dell computer I have used. It used an ATI Radeon graphics card, and sometimes it would overheat, and the fan would get extremely loud, and everything would freeze. you have to manually turn it off and on. It happened at the most unsuspecting moments, usually when doing nothing, or something like drawing with MSPaint.

Also: I don't really like aero, or the windows XP theme for that matter. I like the classic windows theme from Windows 2000



Now Arch Linux:



The only important things here are KEGA-Fusion and RSBot (a runescape bot). RC is just a recovery console for Windows XP.

I need a new desktop environment. Any suggestions? xfce4 is not very impressive, and I see some glitches. I have to auto hide the taskbar because my screen is so narrow and sometimes buttons run off of the displayable screen area. I wish I had those extra 168 pixels.

If I still had Windows XP Professional on my laptop, I'd post it here, and if I wasn't out of town, I'd post my desktop's desktop. I think I have a screenshot of windows 7 before I disabled visual effects somewhere. Can't find it. 

 

[Nova]

As you can see, I've cleaned it up a bit.

 

[torpor]

As you can see, I've cleaned it up a bit.

Nice calendar program, whats it called?

 

[Nova]

As you can see, I've cleaned it up a bit.

Nice calendar program, whats it called?

Dateline. Nice thing is that it syncs with iCal. I definitely recommend it.

 

[dnlgreenwood]

I just installed kde yesterday. I'm liking it.

 

[Nova]

Bloody hell, that's beautiful. Puts Mac to shame.

 

[quote]

Are all the windows so glassy? I would have though that it'd just get distracting after a while.

 

[sebt3]

Are all the windows so glassy? I would have though that it'd just get distracting after a while.

No that's just a container (plasmoid to sound pedentic) on the desktop

 

[dflemstr]

Are all the windows so glassy? I would have though that it'd just get distracting after a while.

No that's just a container (plasmoid to sound pedentic) on the desktop

It will be different in KDE 4.6, see my shot for more info:

You'll of course be able to disable it - as much as you will be able to disable the plasma transparency if you want. I for one like it though, because normally you have a single-colored window, and that makes it stand out, so that you focus on it. If the window itself is transparent, however, and only important things are opaque - such as icons and text fields etc - you're able to focus on what you're doing much more easily.

EDIT: Normally a window looks like this:

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

Here's what my desktop looks like nowadays, now that it's actually cleaned up:



Here's an example of what my general, everyday productivity looks like:



Why am I playing Mass effect and Farcry 2 at the same time? Because I can!

Just kidding, I don't really do that. But here's a realistic example of what my general, everyday "productivity" looks like:



And then an example of what things look like if I'm reading an article online, browsing forums on my second screen, or anything else that requires some height and screen real estate:



And yes, I am using firefox in addition to Google Chrome. I like chrome, I really do. It's fast, nice looking, etc. But it doesn't have the feature set that firefox does quite yet. I like that chrome's interface takes up a lot less room on my screen and things like that. But it doesn't have the extensions that Firefox does, and I personally can't live without Adblock plus. So I use firefox on my widescreen monitor, and chrome on my vertical monitor. The fun part about it is I can drag a link from firefox into chrome and open it up. So If I need/want to view a page using chrome, I simply grab the link or the address from the address bar and drop it into chrome for easy viewing in my second monitor.

My second monitor is also good for things like ebooks. It's also good for editing multiple layers of video in Sony Vegas, working with multiple audio tracks in audacity, detail view in Windows Explorer, and it's also a good place to put the gimp's toolboxes when working on images on my first monitor.

It's a really nice setup. I still need to work some things out with it, but I like it.

Edit: Here's my very simplistic Lubuntu desktop on my EEE PC 900. Not too many applications, and I haven't actually installed anything aside from flash, cmatrix, and frozen bubble.

 

[Gerix]

I changed the background recently. I like the news ticker, but it glitches out if I put more than one story per source on it. IDK, I'm hoping it gets fixed in an update.

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

I changed the background recently. I like the news ticker, but it glitches out if I put more than one story per source on it. IDK, I'm hoping it gets fixed in an update.

What is that, KDE 3.X in gentoo? It looks nice.

 

[lizard808uk]

I changed the background recently. I like the news ticker, but it glitches out if I put more than one story per source on it. IDK, I'm hoping it gets fixed in an update.

What is that, KDE 3.X in gentoo? It looks nice.

nope its xfce..

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

I changed the background recently. I like the news ticker, but it glitches out if I put more than one story per source on it. IDK, I'm hoping it gets fixed in an update.

What is that, KDE 3.X in gentoo? It looks nice.

nope its xfce..

Ah. Most X11 environments in linux look the same to me.

 

[IsSuE]

I changed the background recently. I like the news ticker, but it glitches out if I put more than one story per source on it. IDK, I'm hoping it gets fixed in an update.

What is that, KDE 3.X in gentoo? It looks nice.

nope its xfce..

Ah. Most X11 environments in linux look the same to me.

WUT? this probably means u have not even looked at the screens posted in this thread

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

WUT? this probably means u have not even looked at the screens posted in this thread

I mean what they look like (more or less) by default, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference. Barring KDE 4 because it's the crysis of desktop environments.


I mean yes, obviously something like rat poison or xmonad or fluxbox looks different, but between XFCE, Gnome, KDE 3.x, and LXDE there are a lot of similarities.

 

[Gerix]

I always thought Compiz Fusion was the Crysis of desktop environments. But I guess everything looks good in screenshots.

I think KDE 3 still looked pretty glassy. And Gnome generally has the double bars, but I imagine you could change that. I actually had my desktop set up that way until I needed to add the status bar.

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

I always thought Compiz Fusion was the Crysis of desktop environments. But I guess everything looks good in screenshots.

I think KDE 3 still looked pretty glassy. And Gnome generally has the double bars, but I imagine you could change that. I actually had my desktop set up that way until I needed to add the status bar.

Well compiz fusion is really just the window manager that runs in addition to KDE, gnome, xfce, etc.