Linux, what are our objectives?

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 10:28:50AM -0500, Don Levey wrote:
> > I do away with all desktop icons completely on my machines.
> > Desktop real-estate is at a premium (he says, looking at a
> > 1680x1050 display next to a 2048x1536 display) and not to be
> > wasted on application launchers.
> > 
> 
> Please forgive the ignorance, but what then do you put on your desktop
> real estate?  I keep a monitor (gkrellm) on there, but apart from
> application launchers that's about it.

There's a pretty wallpaper. I see it rarely.

I have two panels; it's set to autohide along the left edge of my
left monitor and on the right edge of my right monitor. That
supplies my common-program-launching and basic monitoring needs
(clock, calculator, volume control, load/RAM/swap).

I have seven virtual screens. I rarely need fewer than that; I
can't really keep track of more than that. 

On those screens:

IM
SSH back home (screen session, same as at home)
corporate mail (screen session, I open this at home, too)
ticket viewer (RT in a browser)
--
web browser (one tab-collector in each monitor)
--
many SSH sessions, at no more than four to a virtual
 screen. (two open on each monitor)
--
occasionally: gnumeric, abiword, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, a few
  other programs

I never iconize programs; if I need to displace them temporarily, I
windowshade them. Rolling the mousewheel on a bit of exposed desktop
changes virtual screens.

I don't use tabbed terminal emulators; I like each window to be
exactly one task, so I can use spatial memory to find them.
Since I have so many, I use aterm, which is an improved version
of rxvt: lower memory usage than classic xterm. (Only a little,
though: aterm with 5000 lines of scrollback buffer is about the
same footprint as xterm with the default buffer.)

-dsr-

-- 
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html is hereby incorporated by reference.

You can't defend freedom by getting rid of it.