If you are tracking unstable, and you were using gnome2, then it’s futile to resist and not to move to gnome3. A lot has been written about gnome3, some poeple love it, others hate it. Others put their head under the sand by using the gnome3 fall-back mode. I’m on the “hate” category. I’ve used the fall-back mode for a while, then switched to the full blown gnome-shell and I’ve tried to use it for one month. I have to admit that is nice looking, intuitive and accessible. However it lacks so many things (gnome shell plug-ins are nice, but we still have to wait quite a while to have back all the fantastic gnome2 plug-ins) that I had in gnome2 that the new shiny look is not enough to keep me using it.
Moreover, apart for the very subjective reasons I gave above (I’m sure then other had different experiences and have a different pain threshold then I do), what I missed the most is the integration with awesome. I started using a tiling window manager last year and my productivity sky rocketed. Going back to manual window placement, overlapping, hiding, and this desperate continuous use of the “expose” functionality of gnome-shell was driving me mad.
So, since I started fresh with the new laptop, I looked around for alternatives. Going KDE is not an option. Many people say it’s nice and it works very well, but it’s not my cup of tea. Going back to gnome 2 was not really an option either. What I knew is that I wanted a desktop environment that is compatible with the freedesktop standards, modular and that would allow me to use my WM of choice.
The almost natural solution was to try xfce4. It seems to me a very nice desktop environment, light weight, extensible and with all the goodies I was looking for. The feeling is very much of gnome2. All components can work independently and it works very well with awesome.
Since i wanted a minimal subset of components I started by installing the xfce4 panel and awsome. This worked ok, but there were a lot of functionality missing, like plug-ins, notifications, automunting, integrations with consolekit, etc…
So after fighting a while, I’ve installed the full xcfe4 stack. Running awesome instead of the standard wm is just a matter of creating a custom session in the user preferences. On the awesome side, you need to disable the awesome panel and the awesome menu. This is all pretty easy and it was pretty much the same conf I used to have with gnome2.
I also tried to use slim as display manager. I’ve to say it works well, but fails to integrate with xfce4 and consolekit leaving me without the correct permissions. Looking for a replacement, I’ve tried ligthdm. This one more used then slim and intergrates perfectly with consolekit solving all my problems.
On very nice application that comes with xfce4 is thunar, their file manager and it integration with Ristretto, the image viewer. It always stuck me how eog and nautilus work badly together…
And since I was at it, I also dumped rhythmbox for listen and f-spot for shotwell . I like these two applications. They do their job well, they are stable (so far) and have all the functionalities I need. Bonus I finally go rid of mono !