Quick hack that mixes-and-matches components from various desktop environments.
Be warned: Most likely you do not want to use this.
- For most of it, I like the UX of GNOME. But GNOME Shell feels slooooow: response/latency to input is “meh” at best, and memory usage is... well, let's say that in retrospective using JavaScript might not have been a great idea.
- Budgie demostrated that
libmutter
can be put to use to write a fast compositor. Unfortunately it will stop using GTK+ and GNOME components in version 11, and anything that doesn't use GTK+ 3.x is more or less broken when using a HiDPI display. - At some point I tried the Pantheon shell, which ships with Elementary. While quite neat inside Elementary, when using their own applications and GTK+ theme modern GTK+/GNOME applications will have visual glitches with most third-party themes, and even with the default Adwaita theme. Wingpanel and Switchboard were crashing very often, and many things wouldn't work (which I blame on trying things on Arch Linux instead of going full Elementary).
- Some of Pantheon's components are quite self-contained, and run happily without the rest of the DE. Prime examples are the Gala compositor and the Plank panel.
The following are needed at runtime:
- Gala 0.3 or newer.
- Plank 0.11 or newer.
- gnome-control-center 3.28 or newer.
- gnome-settings-daemon 3.28 or newer.
- mate-screensaver 1.20 or newer (works better than gnome-screensaver
Additionally, I tend to use the following as well:
- Many GNOME core applications: Nautilus, Epiphany, Eog...
- Termite, which can do many things with the keyboard.
- Synapse. While ULauncher looks sleeker and is better maintained, it takes more than double the amoun of memory compared to Synapse.
- The Pantheon Screenshot tool.
This frankendesktop is quite rough on the edges, and there are a few shortcomings you may want to be aware of — this is not just for anybody!
- No UI for configuration.
dconf-editor
is your friend, or even usinggsettings
in the command line if that's how you roll. - No panel with application menus. I'm currently shopping for one,
budgie-panel
kinda works but I would like something simple which can autohide, show tasks for the current desktop, have an area for status icons, clock/calendar, and has an applications menu. Bonus points if it can take the applications menus using D-Bus and display them.
MIT.