Desktop Thread: Post your desktops here!

[Solse]

I feel like the Playground is a pretty tech-savvy bunch as a whole, and as such, many of our desktops probably look different than the default. Whether you're using simple stuff like Rainmeter or going more complex with Blackbox for Windows or alternative desktop environments for Linux, this is where to post your desktop! You can also critique other users' desktops and give them advice. One thing I'd like to point out initially: if your desktop is the default with a different wallpaper, this is not where to post. Sorry bout that.

Anyway, have fun posting and critiquing!

[Solse]

I suppose I'll go first with my Awesome WM theme:

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I tried to go for a blue, somewhat minimalist theme but not that extreme minimalism that you see everybody doing nowadays. It took a lot of work to set this up, because I have a High-DPI monitor which by default doesn't work well with Linux. If you didn't notice, I set transparency on all terminals and the top bar. I hope you like it, it's my first go at creating one of these.

EDIT: I just realized that the `screenfetch` window isn't entirely visible. Whoopsies.

[noparlpf]

Here's my current desktop. (A few files/folders are blocked out because they have names in them, like my resumé down by the application stuff. Edit – Looks like I saved it too small to read those anyway, but whatever.)

Although, I'm planning on putting together a computer in the next few months and it might not be running Windows as the main OS, so who knows what it'll look like next year. Probably about the same but without the little Windows logo.

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[Max™]

I got the spacing right manually in GIMP because just grabbing the full desktop stitches it together without the screen edges.

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[noparlpf]

I got the spacing right manually in GIMP because just grabbing the full desktop stitches it together without the screen edges.

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What kind of monitor do you have on the left?

[Flickerdart]

It's probably a regular monitor, mounted sideways. It's a much better use for old, low-res monitors than horizontal orientation.

[valadil]

I suppose I'll go first with my Awesome WM theme:

Was not expecting any linux, let alone another tiling WM user. Well done!

Here's my xmonad.

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Unfortunately tiling window managers all look alike. My bar is vaguely interesting. My right screen bar is a script I wrote to fetch however many google calendar events will fit on one line. The music player on the right is cmus in a urxvt, with a script that runs on song change to change the terminal's bg to the current album's art.

[Max™]

What kind of monitor do you have on the left?

Yar, replaced the old 1280x1024 with a 768x1366 that I could vesa mount and gave the old one to the father-in-law when I built him a system.

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Linux here too btw, Arch linux and KDE for life, supposedly Plasma Next will be fully functional soon but I missed a lot of my KDE features last time I tried a month ago.

[Solse]

Was not expecting any linux, let alone another tiling WM user. Well done!

Here's my xmonad.

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Unfortunately tiling window managers all look alike. My bar is vaguely interesting. My right screen bar is a script I wrote to fetch however many google calendar events will fit on one line. The music player on the right is cmus in a urxvt, with a script that runs on song change to change the terminal's bg to the current album's art.

Damn, that's some really nice scripting prowess. Might I ask how you removed all borders/urlbars/menus on Firefox? Is it a theme that you downloaded?

[valadil]

Damn, that's some really nice scripting prowess. Might I ask how you removed all borders/urlbars/menus on Firefox? Is it a theme that you downloaded?

Thanks! I use Firefox with the vimperator plugin. It gives Firefox a bunch of keybindings from vim so you can navigate mouse free. I changed the guioptions config setting to remove all that extra stuff that was taking up space.

[LokeyITP]

I go for boring and functional, turning off 95% of KDE effects. Good for comp use, bad for cool screenies.

[Max™]

Thanks! I use Firefox with the vimperator plugin. It gives Firefox a bunch of keybindings from vim so you can navigate mouse free. I changed the guioptions config setting to remove all that extra stuff that was taking up space.

I did a similar thing but I just condensed it all into one bar using a greasemonkey script, classic theme restorer, and hidetitlebarplus. Moved the controls so they can be hit by aiming at the top of the screen to give them infinite vertical height.

@namespace url(http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul);
    
#TabsToolbar, #tabbrowser-tabs *|tab {    
    font-size:     11px !important;
    height:        10px !important;
    min-width:     110px !important
    }
   
#urlbar {
    font-size:     12px !important;
    height:        24px !important;
    min-height:    1px !important;
    margin: 0 0 0 0 !important;
    }

I should probably include the full thing into the script by itself since I think I know enough coding to do that now.

[valadil]

I did a similar thing but I just condensed it all into one bar using a greasemonkey script...

How exactly did you figure out what elements were supported? I'm interested in this kind of thing, but never found satisfying documentation. It was like I'd find #urlbar or #TabsToolbar in someone else's project, but couldn't find whatever docs mozilla produced that listed and described all the chrome elements.

[Telok]

Desktop...

Spoiler: It's ALIVE!!!

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After more than twenty years in hibernation I dug it out and set it up.

That. Is a desktop.

[Whoracle]

Oooh, one of those :)

My current work desktop in all it's glory:

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And once more, central monitor only, without open programs:

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And my current desktop at home with the project I'm currently working on:

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Same wallpaper.

Running Arch Linux and Fluxbox at work. Terminal is urxvt, and the bottom thingies on the 2nd screen is conky.
At home it's the same, but in that screenshot it's plain Win7 because the DAW doesn't run smooth under WINE.

[snip]The music player on the right is cmus in a urxvt, with a script that runs on song change to change the terminal's bg to the current album's art.[snip]

Care to share the script and theme? :D

[Flickerdart]

I am curious - a lot of people seem to run their browser at a fractional width of the screen, with the remaining portion just showing the background. If you do that, what is the logic behind it?

[Max™]

I am curious - a lot of people seem to run their browser at a fractional width of the screen, with the remaining portion just showing the background. If you do that, what is the logic behind it?

16:9 isn't ideal for browsing the web, I can access my most usedtools and such in the widget launcher there, see my weather stuff, and so forth, or to put it another way, why do people maximize their browser and leave those big gaps on the sides?


Incidentally I pulled the syntax and stuff for the tab bar from an addon, classic theme restorer I think, and fiddled with til I was happy.

New desktop:

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[noparlpf]

I am curious - a lot of people seem to run their browser at a fractional width of the screen, with the remaining portion just showing the background. If you do that, what is the logic behind it?

I find that there's too much white space on most sites at my resolution/ratio/whatchacallit, so I leave about 3-4 icons worth of space on the right so I can drag pictures from the browser and have a little space to organise or rename them before they go into the pictures folder. Also, my Skype chat windows are usually on that side (I have it do the split view with the contacts bar separate) so I can see when the other person is typing (even if the chat windows is not quite entirely visible).

New desktop:

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Oh, nice.

[factotum]

I am curious - a lot of people seem to run their browser at a fractional width of the screen, with the remaining portion just showing the background. If you do that, what is the logic behind it?

I do this, and my logic is pretty much the same as everyone else here--most websites are not well designed for widescreen displays, so I prefer to have the browser in a more square aspect ratio.

[ChristianSt]

I am curious - a lot of people seem to run their browser at a fractional width of the screen, with the remaining portion just showing the background. If you do that, what is the logic behind it?

I do this, and my logic is pretty much the same as everyone else here--most websites are not well designed for widescreen displays, so I prefer to have the browser in a more square aspect ratio.

No matter the actual width you have to work with, after a certain length it just gets harder to read. So you can't slap just slap a "width:100%" to your text and thus you actually need to rearrange content in a meaningful way so it can still be processed nicely. Which sometimes isn't that easy.
On the other hand most websites are tuned to be accessible on mobile devices and are thus required to work nicely with smaller widths. (And even if wasted space due to high-width isn't great, it isn't that problematic from a user experience perspective.)

It kinda is a lot like the line width normally used during programming. Even though you have more space available it is quite common (depending on who you ask) to limit a line to 80-120 characters. [It also makes stuff like a side-by-side diff easier, but even without this reason it would be much harder to process lines that span the complete monitor width.)

[valadil]

Care to share the script and theme? :D

I haven't really packaged it up for distribution, so bear with me.

I have cmus configured to run this script whenever the song changes. Only bother with the folder.jpg section and half of that can be ignored.
https://github.com/sagotsky/.dotfile...ent.sh#L23-L36

I run the cmus in a urxvt. Before running cmus, this script runs in the background. It shades the album art so my white text will show up and caches a copy for later because shading can take a couple seconds. I'd love to use a text-shadow instead of shading the background, but the only term I've found that supports that is ancient and fugly.
https://github.com/sagotsky/.dotfile...-background.sh

And here's the cmus theme. It's grayscale because I didn't want it to clash with the album art.
https://github.com/sagotsky/.dotfile...nsparent.theme

[Whoracle]

Thanks :)

The theme works, albeit not in screen atm. I'll have to fiddle around with that.

The script so far does not work for me, but then I just threw it into place and prayed for the best. Gonna have a look at this in detail later.

[valadil]

Thanks :)

The theme works, albeit not in screen atm. I'll have to fiddle around with that.

The script so far does not work for me, but then I just threw it into place and prayed for the best. Gonna have a look at this in detail later.

Do you have 256 color support in screen? Would you consider switching to tmux? (Very similar set of features, but tmux is newer and has learned from screen's mistakes so it has a cleaner implementation.)

There are a number of dependencies in the script and I did not write it particularly robustly. I think it was a proof of concept that worked well enough that I just kinda left it alone. I'd change "#!/bin/bash" to "#!/bin/bash -x" to get feedback for each command so you can see where it's dying. You should have xrandr. You probably won't have feh, but that shouldn't make it die.

[Whoracle]

Do you have 256 color support in screen? Would you consider switching to tmux? (Very similar set of features, but tmux is newer and has learned from screen's mistakes so it has a cleaner implementation.)

Yeah, I'll probably do that. Already did on all my servers, but I've been lazy on my desktops.

There are a number of dependencies in the script and I did not write it particularly robustly. I think it was a proof of concept that worked well enough that I just kinda left it alone. I'd change "#!/bin/bash" to "#!/bin/bash -x" to get feedback for each command so you can see where it's dying. You should have xrandr. You probably won't have feh, but that shouldn't make it die.

I've got xrandr and feh, so I'm good on that part. Will try with bash -x though. I'll let you know once I get my lazy bum around to it :) Pretty much spending all my time in Windows atm, since I can't switch Reaper/Win to Reaper/WINE in the middle of a project :/

[danzibr]

Figured I'd post here...

I'm looking to upgrade my old desktop. It's a big sluggish. Here are the specs:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40 GHz
Memory (RAM): 2 GB
System type: 32-bit
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT

By the way I know very little of computers. Right now I'm like uninstalling stuff. Seems to be speeding it up.

Thanks!

EDIT: Ya know, I'll make a different thread. Don't want to railroad this one.

[Appleshy1973]