[conspire] Desktop survey

[p***@ieee.org]

Before installing Debian on my new machine, I need to decide on which desktop: cinnamon, gnome, kde,lxde, mate, and xfce.  Too many choices.

I am asking everyone to name their personal preference and a brief "why".

[Rick Moen]

Post by p***@ieee.org
Before installing Debian on my new machine, I need to decide on which
desktop: cinnamon, gnome, kde,lxde, mate, and xfce.  Too many choices.
I am asking everyone to name their personal preference and a brief "why".

I'll give three in order:

1. None of the above. Why: The notion that one must run a 'Desktop
Environment' (DE) suite in order to have comfortable desktop computing
is simply false. A DE is just a marketing concept for a specific X11
window manager bundled with a graphical file manager and a suite of
applications and applets of similar appearance that all rely on the same
graphics toolkit. You just don't _need_ to have one of those kitchen
sinks as a bundlle. Instead, you can run your personal preference in
X11 window manager, and pick any or all other applications you wish, and
avoid the ones you have no use for, on an a la carte basis.

My strong preference is for the latter approach. If I go shopping for a
stand mixer for my kitchen, I'd rather not be sweet-talked by the
department store salesman into purchasing instead a bundle consisting of
a stand mixer, a blender, a spice grinder, a new kitchen faucet, and
several hundred matching floor tiles. _I just want a stand mixer._
A DE strikes me as analogous to just such an overblown bundle.

Another frequent misconception to avoid: Installing a DE (example, KDE)
with its default applications and applets in no way prevents you from
also installing and enjoying applications ordinarily bundled with a
different DE (example: GNOME).

tl;dr: The common notion that DEs are some sort of monolith that
constrain one's choice of code is somewhere between a user delusion and
a developer con-job, and in any event should be avoided.

How do you _not_ run a DE? The easiest way is to not install one in the
first place, which is usually trivially easy if you just pay attention
during the installation and avoid doing a 'forehead install', one you
complete by just repeatedly hitting the space bar with your forehead.
In other words, when you hit the screens where you pick what to install
and not to install, _do that_. Don't just accept defaults.

If you happen to have done something like a forehead install and ended
up with a DE, it's not at all difficult to disable or remove the DE.
To disable it, disable whatever startup script launches the X11 session
manager. To remove it, use your distro's package tool.

If you don't know how to do that, _learn_. Otherwise, you're not a Linux
user, just a tourist. Ability to decide what your system runs, and
ability to decide what is and isn't installed, are ground-level Linux
101 learning tasks all newcomers should learn soonest.


2. Moksha Desktop (https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/), as
provided by desktop distribution Bodhi Linux, a third-party variant on
of Ubuntu Linux LTS. Why: Elegant, sparse, fast. (Moksha Desktop is
a startlingly effective descendant of the Enlightenment window manager
famous in the early 2000s, invented by two of my colleagues at VA Linux
Systems, known by their online nicknames Mandrake and Rasterman.)
Please note, if trying Bodhi Linux, that the distro's _default
installation_ is deliberately minimal. The intention is that you will
then use AppCenter, Synaptic, or apt-get to install whatever packages
you want. See: https://www.bodhilinux.com/w/adding-software/


3. LXDE (older) or LXQt (replacement). Why: LXDE is a lightweight,
fast DE based on the gtk+ v. 2 graphical toolkit. The developers found,
fiveyears ago, however, that gtk+ v2 was a development dead-end
because the GNOME people EOLed the toolkit and because newer versions of
gtk+ necessitated near-total code rewrites and also that the developers
were increasingly hostile and unhelpful to anyone outside the GNOME
project. Therefore, they made a difficult choice to migrate away from
gtk+ to the alternative Qt graphical toolkit (best known as the toolkit
underlying KDE), joining forces with separate Razor-qt DE project to
create a successor called LXQt.

Some distros still ship LXDE, but it is in the ongoing process of being
discontinued. For example, Lubuntu now ships the LXQt DE as of Lubuntu
18.10, released in October 2018.



Tip: To find out what distros provide particular DEs, use Distrowatch's
search page.

[Michael Paoli]

Don't need no steenkin' Desktop Environment (DE).
For X11 (well, if you really want more than just text ... sometimes a
picture or diagram, etc. is useful), all you really need is some
window manager (WM). Too many choices? Ooh, ooh, lots more than for
just the (bloated!, buggy!, ...) DEs.
STFW (Search The Fine Web), e.g.:
site:debian.org window managers
https://wiki.debian.org/WindowManager
If you *really* want DE ...
https://wiki.debian.org/DesktopEnvironment
And if some of that information/documentation is out-of-date, hey, it's
a wiki, you can fix that! :-)

Personally, I prefer/(mostly)use fvwm ... but may or may not be what you
want/prefer. I most notably like about fvwm:
o can do darn near everything without need of / to touch pointing device
(some folks like/prefer ratpoison for similar reasons)
o highly customizeable/extensible (basically I can spend some time maybe
about once every 2 years or so with a new Debian stable release, and tweak
things to get it to behave exactly the way *I* want it to ... rather
than someone else's preferred default configuration (folks would generally
save a lot of wasted time and disappointment if they bothered to actually
look at documentation/configurations, and adjust things to their preferences
rather than toss stuff else and look for something else where they prefer
the defaults, and mostly do nothing other than see which (e.g.
distribution's! defaults, they preferred over all the others))
o most all config changes can be made dynamically and take effect immediately
o not bloated - sure, there are even more lean smaller WMs - but those teeny
ones aren't very capable/flexible/configurable ... or at least not nearly
as much as fvwm
o It's not a DE - I don't want something that pulls in some huge bungle of
a whole lot 'o cr*p I mostly don't want and am not interested in.

Oh, yeah, Debian :-) ... no shortage of choices! Yeah! So, ... can try 'em
out, ... maybe fiddle with some configs a bit ... try some others, after a
bit, settle on one you (mostly) like, and tweak/configure to one's
satisfaction ... should likely end up with something one's quite to
highly satisfied with. Also doesn't hurt to keep some other WMs around
too (like I do) ... might want to fire 'em up on (semi-)rare occasion ...
just to see what they look like, or how some stuff behaves/looks/feels under
'em for a bit, or to examine some potential issue or whatever. Sometimes
some apps are written for or to take advantage of some particular WM or
DE ... in many cases it'll also run under other WMs ... but might be
sub-optimal (for certain definitions of such) ... e.g. might lack
some "decorations" or some particular (generally minor) bells and whistles
or styling that some particular WM or DE offers, that many/most others
don't have that particular special snowflake additional widget decoration
thingies or whatever. (E.g. I commonly fire up apps for KDE or Gnome under
fvwm ... stuff mostly works - at least "well enough", though sometimes has
some artifacts of not being in its designed for native environment).

<We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.>

Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2018 16:48:00 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [conspire] Desktop survey
Before installing Debian on my new machine, I need to decide on
which desktop: cinnamon, gnome, kde,lxde, mate, and xfce.? Too many
choices.
I am asking everyone to name their personal preference and a brief "why".

[Rick Moen]

Post by Michael Paoli
For X11 (well, if you really want more than just text ... sometimes a
picture or diagram, etc. is useful), all you really need is some
window manager (WM). Too many choices? Ooh, ooh, lots more than for
just the (bloated!, buggy!, ...) DEs.
site:debian.org window managers
https://wiki.debian.org/WindowManager
If you *really* want DE ...
https://wiki.debian.org/DesktopEnvironment
And if some of that information/documentation is out-of-date, hey, it's
a wiki, you can fix that! :-)

As long as we're providing that sort of link, Matt Chapman's is a
perennial classic: http://www.xwinman.org/

It's venerable enough that the site actually predates the concept of a
'Desktop Environment', which in a way is why it's calleed XWinMan -- but
Mark has added coverage of (some) DEs to his prior coverage of (some)
window managers. One notable attraction to the pages there is
user-contributed screenshots, so you know what an asserted-typical setup
looks like.

[Michael Paoli]

Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:02:37 -0800
Subject: [conspire] Cheese it, it's the (French) cops!

BTW, is it necessary to have the French Police siren?

Context is that the scrounged PIII-based Rackspace pizza-box server
still running linuxmafia.com has a not-very-loud alert sound going
off 24x7, which IMO is slightly annoying during indoor CABAL meetings,
but not IMO greatly so. The alert is a two-tone thing slightly
reminiscent of the police siren you encounter in Pink Panther movies
(thus the name Duncan Mackinnon bestowed on this background noise).
I'm following up, however, to share the reason why I find this audible
alarm a really funny example of how to screw up the human-factors aspect
of computer hardware design, and also to warn that similar screw-ups abound.
So, to review, what the 'French Police' alert seems to be about: This
Rackspace box is the ratty old server enclosure that from the early
2000s until a decade ago ran lists.svlug.org. It lived inside Joe
McGuckin's small colo in Palo Alto, Via.net, until Via.net pulled the
plug on hosting SVLUG for free, at which point the unused hardware got
dumped in my garage. I didn't do a thing with the machine until the day
my final spare VA Linux 2230 motherboard died. Just on a hunch, I
detached my SCSI hard drives from the dead motherboard, connected them
to the Rackspace one, flipped the power on, and my server came fully
back online. Great, do another full backup, then leave the machine the
hell alone pending migration to something modern. (Which hasn't
happened yet.) And, the more-than-faint-but-less-than-loud alert tone
has been present all the time it's been powered on.
What's it alerting about? Well, the Rackspace came with dual PIII CPUs,
but one cannot help noticing that one of those CPUs has a frozen,
no-longer-spinning CPU fan on top of it. This is in general terms a
Very Bad Thing, and I consider it highly likely that the PIII under the
frozen fan died the death shortly after the fan froze up. (This is one
reason why I vastly prefer passive cooling over anything mechanical,
particularly fans.) I'd be very, very surprised if that audible alarm
is saying anything but 'Hey, server owner. You might want to know that
one of your two CPUs is utterly borked.'

And, had earlier occurred to me, but I'd not peeked until just wee bit
ago, ... I actually have login access to that host, so ...

$ ssh -ax linuxmafia.com. 'exec cat /proc/cpuinfo'
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1000.089
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
mca cmov pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 2000.17
clflush size : 32
cache_alignment : 32
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 32 bits virtual
power management:

processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1000.089
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
mca cmov pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 2000.22
clflush size : 32
cache_alignment : 32
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 32 bits virtual
power management:

$

So, still shows both CPUs there, ... so ... maybe not (totally?) borked?
It might be alarming about the failed fan, ... or something else. Who
knows what. Could probably even run some command(s) to see if
processes are running on both CPUs. I don't recall if that CPU
model, etc. has multiple cores or not ... I don't think so, but I don't
recall for sure (and yes, that can of course be looked up). There's also
pretty good documentation around about how to interpret the contents of
the /proc/cpuinfo file.

Use of
# dmidecode
might also be useful - it may display and decode enough hardware information
to possibly indicate if there are detected hardware error(s) present.

But here's what's so flippin' hilarious: Rackspace pizza-box servers
are intended for colos, not meditation chambers. I mean, for Ghu's
sake, the name of the company is _Rackspace_. And the reason why the
machine ran for untold years at Via.net while screaming its little heart
out to the best abilities of a tinny little speaker is that
_nobody could possibly hear it in a noisy colo_.
Like, good grief, whoever decided to use a somewhat faint audible alarm
for major hardware failure in a _colo_ just didn't bother to think at
all. That's like overhead billboards in Braille. It's unclear on the
concept of 'colo'.
But, as mentioned, this sort of hilarious failure to think through human
factors is something you find widely in computer hardware. Anyone
remember when, in 2006, I tracked down, using iterative kernel compiles
with 'make -i NNN' set high enough, two bad ECC DIMM sticks in my _prior_
VA Linux 2230 motherboard?
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2006-December/002662.html
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2006-December/002668.html
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2007-January/002743.html
As mentioned in the second message, _after_ finding the two bad DIMMs,
it occurred to me to wonder why the system hadn't informed me about this
highly detectable hardware problem. I mean, it was ECC (error
correcting-code) memory in a ECC-enabled server motherboard (Intel
L440GX+ 'Lancewood'). Shouldn't it grab the admin's attention to say
'Hey, there's severely defective RAM in this system. Maybe you should
fix that before you corrupt all data passing through memory.'?
It should have. It didn't. Part of the issue was that the L440GX+
BIOS was not configured to enable the maximal amount of extended-memory
testing, which Reg Charney, the machine's prior owner had doubtless set,
as pretty much anyone would, because POST-checking gigs of memory adds
an absurd amount to boot-up time and seldom is useful. Enabling that
extra amount of checking _did_ cause BIOS messages to display at boot
time (only) suggesting, e.g., that there was a bad stick in socket J0,
1. The message displayed only at boot. Part of the point of running
a server is to not boot it more than once in a blue moon.
2. The message displayed only at the console. Part of the point of
running a server is to (usually) run it headless (no monitor).
So, another overhead billboard in Braille, basically -- and this
on something really important, defective RAM.
Your third example was something I encountered on the job around 2005,
while I was working at Linux firm California Digital Corporation in
Fremont. This was in some senses a successor firm to VA Linux Systems,
having bought out all of VA Linux's remaining parts and remaining in the
hardware market VA Linux Systems abandoned to chase after proprietary
software. (VA Linux systems rather stupidly refused to provide its
branding or customer lists to California Digital, and those were just
dropped in the ashcan.)
California Digital was run by owners BJ Arun and his wife. One day, a
VA Linux Systems customer visited us in great distress, seeking our
help, and bringing his collapsed Oracle server, a VA Linux Systems 2250,
which was a 2U rackmount machine with the same Lancewood motherboard
but also a hot-swap SCA SCSI backplane so that hard drives could be
swapped in and out if any failed. The backplane was served by an
(expensive) Mylex hardware-RAID SCSI host-bus adapter, a PCI card.
On this guy's machine, there were maybe six 36GB SCSI hard drives in the
drive bays, configured in the Mylex RAID set as a RAID5 array. Some of
these drives had failed, one after another, so that there were (as of
that day) just barely fewer than the minimum number of drives still
living to support the RAID array. The storage volume had dropped offline,
Oracle RDBMS had choked, and _suddenly_ the customer realised he had a
huge problem. (And yes, he had completely failed to have backups.)
Arun worked out with the customer that I would work on a
time-and-materials basis for a day to see if I could revive his Oracle
files. By judicious fiddling, I was able after a couple of hours to
convince the most-recently-failed SCSI drive to go back online and be
activated in the Mylex configuration, which brought the data volume
(tenuously) back to life. Then, crossing my fingers, I plugged a spare
36GB Seagate Cheetah (IIRC) SCA SCSI drive into the hotplug backplane,
told the Mylex controller to add it to the RAID array, let it remirror,
and at the end decommissioned the recently-failed drive. Last, I added
replacements for the other failed drives, did another remirror, and
yanked the other failed drives. Total time was, I believe, six hours of
billable time plus three spare hard drives. Sadly, the customer was
_not_ thrilled -- which he should have been -- but rather bitched
operatically about how expensive it was for me to have just saved his
bacon. Some people just are never happy.
But the point is: The guy had suffered _progressive_ failure of three
(IIRC) mission-critical server hard drives on a vital Linux server with
an expensive RAID controller, chewing gradually through the hot spares
and then the live storage until catastrophic failure happened, but had
had absolutely no idea this syndrome was occurring and worsening. Why?
I think the Mylex was one of the ExtremeRAID models with this BIOS-based
firmware: http://www.aselebyar.nu/imgupload/doc_1177508286.pdf
Docs tell you all about how to configure a RAID array, etc.
Let's say you're very, very wary, and are plowing through the docs to
find an answer to the question 'How am I, the admin, going to be
informed that my hot spares are being used up, and that, hey buddy,
maybe you should start replacing failed hard drives?' You look, you
look and you look some more. Eventually on page 2-16 you find this
Default = Disabled
If Enabled, the Device Health Monitoring (S.M.A.R.T.) feature
will scane physical devices for Information Exception Conditions
(IEC) and Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) warnings and return
the warnings to the user. S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring
Analysis and Reporting Technolgogy.
Oh, terrific. First of all, it's _disabled by default_. But second,
the vague handwave about 'return the warnings to the user' indicates the
further and arguably worse problem. What does that mean? Hoist a flag
and play Yankee Doodle Dandy? Send a stiff letter to the _Times_?
Oh, dunno, maybe lob an e-mail or SMS to the admin?
Surprise: none of the above.
All the Mylex docs _really_ mean the card will do, when it receives
'Hey, this drive is sick and about to die' information from a hard
drive's electronics, is log the information into the Mylex card's
non-volatile memory in standard S.M.A.R.T. format. How is this
vital and time-sensitive warning data 'returned to the user'? The Mylex
attitude, quite typically, was 'Not my problem, Jack. Sounds like
something the admin should be taking care of.'
Which is to say, on your choice of operating system including Linux, you
can _have_ softare running that keeps an eye on S.M.A.R.T. data and
sends you a telegram or whatever if there's a problem. Forgot to do
that? Oops, you lose. Gosh, shame that all that redundancy and
checking data kept getting logged but nobody was looking at it.
Just another billboard painstakingly crafted in Braille. Something
computer hardware designers seem to do on any random day ending in 'y'.
(Oh, BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmontools )