== My three sorts of (Linux) desktops

To kind of expand on a comment I made on [[an earlier entry
Fedora15DependencyFailure]], I broadly have three sorts of
Linux desktops.

On machines I don't use very much and thus don't really care about I use
whatever the default environment is, sometimes slightly customized if
it's easy enough and I'm using the system more than once. All I really
care about on these machines is getting to a terminal emulator (so
that I can run ssh) and sometimes being able to run a browser. Oh, and
actually connecting to the network.

On machines that I use enough to want to be productive on, I make some
or many of my [[standard Gnome customizations GnomeCustomizations]]
([[also ConvenientGnomeSsh]]). I still only really care about ssh and a
browser, but now I want the whole process to be convenient and not too
annoying.

(This assumes that these machines run Gnome as their standard
environment. My EEEPc didn't, so I wound up customizing its environment
instead of trying to build a Gnome environment on it. My general
attitude on these machines is that it's not worth fighting the defaults,
but it is worth customizing things.)

On my primary machines, the machines I sit in front of all of the time
(either at work or at home), I run [[my full custom desktop environment
../sysadmin/MyDesktopTour]].  My desktop is a lot of work to set up but
it's what I'm used to and it's highly tuned to work just the way I want
it to. This environment has basically nothing to do with Gnome except
sometimes using some Gnome applets or running some Gnome programs to do
specific things.

(There's a very hard line between the second and the third sort of
desktop, but the line between the first and the second is of course
fuzzy.)

Since I only use Gnome on machines that I don't really use that often
or care that much about, I'm pretty indifferent to what horrors the
Gnome developers do to the Gnome environment provided that they don't
hide the terminal application or the web browser (or make them very
inconvenient to use).  Gnome could make itself very irritating on the
second sort of machine by eliminating both the sshmenu applet (which
Gnome 3 sort of has) and the mini-commander (which it doesn't seem to
have yet), but this wouldn't necessarily be fatal for my ability to use
Gnome productively; I could live with starting shells and typing '_ssh
whatever_' myself if I had to.

=== Sidebar: the other reason to be lazy about Gnome on laptops

My strong impression is that an ever-increasing amount of things that
you need to work on a laptop basically require a full Gnome environment
(or far too much hacking).  I'm thinking of things like useful wireless
networking, dynamic networking in general, and automatically suspending
and unsuspending as the lid is closed and opened. Letting Gnome worry
about all of this magic is certainly the easy approach to dealing with
it.

It is thus not terribly surprising that my work laptop runs Gnome. My
time is too limited to spend it working out how to do wireless by hand.

(Working out how to do dynamic mounting of removable media was annoying
enough.)