[XorNot]

> and to use no desktop environment,

Why do people write comments like this as though it's reasonable way to use an everyday driver PC?

"I don't use a DE" - well then yes, obviously but you've also removed like 80% of the functionality to turn the thing into a dumb console. That's not what I want to use a computer for.

[nextos]

No, DE doesn't mean I have a dumb console. It just means it's a bit lighter. I have all services a modern desktop has, I still run X plus a window manager.

I imagine Xfce or even GNOME 3 can be tweaked a bit to be almost equally energy efficient.

[zwaps]

I see no evidence that anyone has ever achieved energy efficiency and battery runtime comparable to windows or macos machines using Xfce or Gnome.

Would love to see what it would take.

[NavinF]

> no desktop environment

> I have all services a modern desktop has

LMAO

I visit this comment section for the same reason I visit a zoo.

[dang]

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[nextos]

> I visit this comment section for the same reason I visit a zoo.

Before making offensive comments, have you thought about the meaning of my statement?

For example, a modern DE offers desktop notifications. I still have that by running a desktop notification daemon, dunst, despite just using X plus a window manager but no DE.

Linux is very much broken into small composable components, the same way Clojure is. To take this comparison further, it is extremely ignorant to claim you can't have the same functionality Rails offers just because you don't use a big framework (which is the equivalent to a DE).

[chmod775]

I feel like this argument would be moot if all had the same understanding of the terms they were using. People seem bit hazy on what that the term desktop environment actually describes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment

[TylerE]

This feels like someone saying: I don’t need a car with a roof, why doesn’t everyone just drive a go kart around?

[t-3]

My car has a roof, it just wasn't chosen for me by someone at MS/Apple/Gnome/KDE. A custom hand-built car is not necessarily more primitive than a factory-standard one, or any less appealing.

[ilyt]

I mean I don't have icons on desktop but that's about only miss of feature (that I don't use on windows either). Alt + F2 for app launcher + rest of it in autostart and under few bindings for common ones. If anything it's faster than anything under Windows, although definitely a power user thing.

Also something like XFCE will still get you the graphical things to fondle without as much power usage as GNOME. The problem is really those (especially GNOME) pissing on performance and thus power usage

[pmontra]

This is not a text only console. It's how I was using UNIX workstations circa 1990. Boot to a script running startx to run X11 and a window manager (ttwm?).

What was I missing? Probably a start menu / launcher (but I guess it can be installed and run anyway) and a control panel for settings.

Which modern software won't run in such a setup? Maybe dbus? Systemd? I think a lot of GUI software would still run, some won't, daemons and servers probably would.

Is this something for the nerdiest 1% of the nerdiest 1%? Definitely. I won't do that myself because it's too much of a hassle and I'll probably have to revert to a standard DE to run some software I need for work, but it will work, mostly.