Exploring Desktop Environments — 8
Migrating to a new desktop environment (DE) is complete. The journey was slow and tedious but methodical — one step at a time.
The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) remains a decent environment and was the early favorite in the migration. There are unresolved paper cuts, some of which might never be resolved. The proverbial elephant in the room is TDE living in /opt purgatory that introduces additional various challenges.
Somewhat surprisingly, KDE now is the primary DE on the office desktop. TDE is being used with the living room media player, alternating with KDE on the T400 laptop, and as an overall backup DE. Xfce remains installed but rarely used. MATE and LXQt were removed from all systems as were all stock Slackware window managers because they never were used.
With either KDE or TDE the new paper cuts are more readily managed and tolerated than GTK paper cuts. Individually the GTK paper cuts might seem insignificant but collectively had caused too much dissatisfaction.
Much sweat equity went into the project. Time was needed to adjust habits and work flows. Nothing dramatic but somewhat like rearranging furniture in a room. Everything remains functional but the view is different.
With the proverbial dust settling, as work flows have been tested and memory muscle adjusted, GTK packages are being removed from the house network.
The DE migration paved the way to update house network systems from Slackware 14.2 to 15.0. Knowing that Akonadi related KDE packages will not be installed, system partitions were resized to recover disk storage space.
Seems the proverbial overhead dark cloud is lifted. This double journey has somewhat taken a toll with the long-term testing and evaluations. Using computers around the house is again a little more enjoyable these days. Time to read books and enjoy some lazy afternoon naps.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General, Migrate
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