Linux Desktop Meme 2009

Answering Silly Questions For No Real Good Reason

Meme from, amongst other places, here and here.

1. Which desktop manager do you use more often?
   
   Ah -- window manager holy wars, how I remember thee well. I got out of the window manager/desktop manager/desktop environment holy wars around the time that I discovered olvwm. Whenever I have a choice that I can implement myself reasonably, that's what I reach for still.
   
   But the key is what can be reasonably implemented. I can touch any one of several dozen systems in the course of a day, some of which can be re-installed or re-imaged at any given time. Setting everything up "just so" would be prohibitive in terms of time and repeated, repeated, repeated effort. So my defense has been to learn to live with the defaults, usually on the Gnome side. I don't like Gnome particularly, but I find that the defaults are more usable than the KDE defaults. KDE still seems very busy to me, and when I'm exposed to all those knobs and controls the temptation is to fiddle with them constantly.
   
   Just get out of my way and let me launch a terminal so I can get some work done. The particulars of your "environment" don't interest me any more.
   
   As far as for day-to-day work, my primary workstation is my laptop, which runs Vista. I run Vista because the Aero desktop is shiny, and because all of the hardware in the laptop runs perfectly with Vista. Suspend and hibernation work, too. Even the wireless network will automatically connect to any networks it knows about when being resumed from suspend.
   
   
2. Which desktop application you would not like to see implemented again on linux? and why?
   
   Personally I don't have an objection to anything getting implemented. Face it: if "good enough" had been, we'd still all be using Minix and DOS. Same goes for common whipping boys like editors and mail clients (although nobody can deny that editors reached perfection with vi, even if there are more conveniences with vim). Re-implementations are an opportunity to try new ideas and to incorporate the best of previous good ideas. If someone wants to spend time creating yet another editor or mail client -- or operating system -- well it is their time, energy, and money to burn, so who are we to tell them otherwise?
   
   
3. Which desktop application you definitely would like to see implemented on linux? describe it briefly or point out to a similar application.
   
   Honestly I don't think I care too much for "desktop" applications any more. I run everything out of VMs, so if I need a Windows application I run it in a Windows VM, sometimes in its own Windows VM so that it doesn't corrupt (or get corrupted by) everything else.
   
   ...that said, maybe a real Exchange client might be useful. Yeah, another mail client, but since Exchange has so much usefulness in terms of calendars, tasks, notes, and general groupware integration (not to mention additional value like Blackberry integration) we won't be seeing the back of it any time soon. And seriously, if it was trivial to knock off a clone of exchange, wouldn't someone have done that by now?
   
   
4. Write the name of the last project (not the very best, the last!) that made you wish to thank their developers so you can thank them now!
   
   Going back through my recent bookmarks I see:
   
   - most recently, NfSen and NFDUMP
   - CloneZilla
   - CentOS which makes so much of my professional life possible these days