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0 pointsqznc9y ago0 comments

I live in terminal and browser almost exclusively, but I still want a full desktop environment. I switched to Mate on my old laptop, because Unity and Gnome3 need to much resources. I tried others (XFCE, LXDE, ...) but they lacked little features like:

* hibernate when closing lid

* cpu/mem/network visualization in top/bottom bar

* clean theme without much fiddling

* mute/unmute via hardware button

And the rest I forgot. I can live with some issues, but it compounds on the less popular DEs.

All those issue apply to Awesome as well. DE is much more than managing windows. A long time ago, I used various tiling window managers, but always ran the various Gnome background services as well.

0 comments

majewsky9y ago

> * hibernate when closing lid

This is actually systemd territory today.

(One of the reasons why I like systemd in practice. They may run counter to the Unix philosophy in every possible way, but at least shit now works the same across nearly all distros and desktops.)

ac299y ago

>(XFCE, LXDE, ...) but they lacked little features like: * hibernate when closing lid * cpu/mem/network visualization in top/bottom bar * clean theme without much fiddling * mute/unmute via hardware button

All of those are possible with XFCE. Technically I think the mute/unmute thing comes through ACPI or something -- it works in any DE I've used.

digi_owl9y ago

On my desktop i have a mute key on the keyboard, and it shows up in X11 as a special key. From there i have set the XFCE keyboard manager to run some ALSA commands on pressing it to toggle the mute state of the master volume control.

Works fine, but then i do not have any transitory (USB) audio devices.

I suspect the lid close can be bound similarly (but these days you have the whole crapola of powerkit/powerd depending on systemd-logind handling the gruntwork, so who really knows).

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