100 reply to this thread means a certain kind of interest, I think is time to do a recap of the situation: the basic idea was to create different type of session to emulate the common desktops environments we can find in Windows (XP and Seven) and OSX. This, in my opinion, could help many people migrate to Lubuntu and Linux in general and at the same time will add more eye candy to the DE. The sessions are an OPTIONAL and as far as I know will not be include on the base system but these sessions will be available as an extra package. Now I'm offering just a script on Lubuntu 13.04, but thanks to the help of Leszek Lesner we are already testing a package trough PPA on the upcoming Lubuntu 13.10. I do apologize but I'm still not so skilled to do all myself! I started with an OSX version using Cairo-Dock because it's the most different DE we can emulate and, at the same time, the heavier to handle due to the presence of a composite manager (Compton) necessary to handle shadows and transparency. This session consumes 32mb more than the stock Lubuntu session and the overall performance is very good even on old systems, there are little slowdowns because of the shadows rendered by the CM. Reducing the shadows size helped a lot.
Someone point me out the advantage of Lubuntu: be lighter. For that reason I'm currently working on a variant of Lubuntu-OSX version WITHOUT a composite manager that use an alternative dock in place of Cairo-Dock: my choice was Plank. Created in Vala by the ElementaryOS team, is a reinterpretation of Docky but without applet or fancy animations. Has not transparency or bouncing effect without compositing, but basically works fine. In this case the footprint is just 15mb more than stock Lubuntu. I've experimented other docks of curse and that's what I found: -Adeskbar:a gtk superlight dock but can not mix launchers with open windows, can act as a panel and has some applets too. Works fine without composite manager. -Docky: Based on Mono, without composite manager loose many options like hide and trasparency. Heavy, 39mb. -DockbarX: It's a bar, act like a panel. It's more a clone of Windows7 panel.No compositing no joy. Can be integrated on xfce-panel as an applet but not on our LxPanel. Damn! 42mb ram! -AWN: even with the flag --no-install-recommends when you install, it tries to put a lot of gnome software in Lubuntu. So I prefer not install it. -Tint2, Simdock and Wbar: those dock are in the repos. I have seen many graphical glitches, Tint is difficult to configure and I confess I didn't test them deeply. Obviously I tested our LxPanel too! I configured it to act as a panel but I got better results with Plank/Cairo-dock. The advantage would be great in terms of resources but what the panel need is the ability to mix launcher with open windows. A sum of Application Launch Bar applet and Task Bar (Windows list) applet. That's the normal behavior of a dock. Julien Lavergne reported there is an experimental lxpanel applet doing this, but nothing stable and official for now. I hope he can do a little bit of pressure to know more about this applet. I think I didn't miss something, that's all for now. I continue working on alternative sessions. :) Thanks for your attention, F. -- Lubuntu-users mailing list Lubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/lubuntu-users
