How Do you Customize Your Linux Desktop?

[Michael]

What do you guys (and gals) do to customize your desktop on a fresh install of your favorite distro?

I just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 Beta on my main system I use for work and personal purposes.

On an Ubuntu distro, all that it takes to satisfy me is just these few packages:

build-essential linux-headers ia32-libs gftp xchat pidgin-guifications git-core curl flashplugin-nonfree thunderbird php5-cli icedtea-gcjwebplugin

and then I am all set. What about you?

[d2kx]

I am using the kde-lite edition of sidux which is only about 450 MB. I am installing Iceweasel (Firefox), Icedove (Thunderbird), KTorrent, Amarok and several games like Nexuiz, BfWesnoth and Xmoto afterwards. I am doing several smaller configurations, like disabling any animations when I minimize/maximize windows, downloading a great wallpaper and configuring the fonts (subpixel and size). The rest, like the proprietary flash, are downloaded when I need them for the first time and swfdec/gnash don't work.

[curaga]

My favorite distro is LFS. It is nothing *but* customization. So, I have to say I don't customize it at all after "installing". Usually this "installing" takes weeks, but so what :P

What I gain is an awesomely fast, light, and entirely in-my-taste system, taking as little space as possible too.

[marco71]

I'm using SimpleKDE on my Slackware machine @home http://www.myl.ro/forum/index.php?ac...ode=01&img=502

[Huenengrab]

On my laptop I'm using Arch Linux and it drops me to a terminal after the installation, so I won't even start listing all packages I need.

My desktop runs Fedora, currently 8, and I at least need my Nvidia-drivers, Transmission, lots of Firefox-extensions, mplayer, liferea and LinuxDC++ and Open Office, because Abiword doesn't behave as good with ODF as I'd expect it to.

I have a special backup of my compiz-configuration which runs on both computers which have a high priority too, because I hate lagging, non-damage-aware windows.

[givemesugarr]

gentoo linux + aggressive settings + qt with qt-copy use flag + kde3.5.9 and xorg from git and my system occupies 300mb ram when started in xorg and less than 5gb of disk space.
it's stable, fast and made on top the machine.

[Tillin9]

I basically have a mostly stock Debian testing system with a few customizations:

- Custom pared down monolithic 2.6.24 kernel (i.e. all always used modules compiled in besides things that work better as modules, a.k.a. ALSA, drm).
- libdrm, MESA, radeon driver from git compiled with processor optimizations.
- Latest Compiz-fusion, fusion-icon, and Emerald themes from tuxfamily's Debian repository.
- Debian Multimedia codecs.
- Superkaramba and KDE themes from KDE-look.org

Considering how much I compile myself, I've toyed with the idea of switching to Gentoo, though seem to be too lazy to actually do so. Thanks for the heads up on Qt-copy, I'm a long time KDE user and never knew about that. Hopefully they'll release a nice KDE 4 theme that makes things (widgets, icons, panel) look more like KDE 3, I greatly dislike the Fisher Price / Vista look.

[marco71]

I am using the kde-lite edition of sidux which is only about 450 MB...

mine is smaller

sh-3.00$ du -sh /opt/kde
149M    /opt/kde
sh-3.00$

favourite X apps: opera, firefox (browsing), thunderbird, claws-mail (mail clients) and kbiff (mail-notification), liferea (news-reader), beep-media-player (audio), mplayer/smplayer (video) and more, avoid java apps as long as possible (for ex. azureus); heavy use of CLI (screen, ssh/scp, wget, lynx/links2, rtorrent, mldonkey, mutt, ...)

[curaga]

my system occupies 300mb ram when started in xorg and less than 5gb of disk space.

Mine is smaller :^)
It takes 57mb of ram after boot & startx, and uses less than 1.4gb of my disk

[givemesugarr]

I basically have a mostly stock Debian testing system with a few customizations:

- Custom pared down monolithic 2.6.24 kernel (i.e. all always used modules compiled in besides things that work better as modules, a.k.a. ALSA, drm).
- libdrm, MESA, radeon driver from git compiled with processor optimizations.
- Latest Compiz-fusion, fusion-icon, and Emerald themes from tuxfamily's Debian repository.
- Debian Multimedia codecs.
- Superkaramba and KDE themes from KDE-look.org

Considering how much I compile myself, I've toyed with the idea of switching to Gentoo, though seem to be too lazy to actually do so. Thanks for the heads up on Qt-copy, I'm a long time KDE user and never knew about that. Hopefully they'll release a nice KDE 4 theme that makes things (widgets, icons, panel) look more like KDE 3, I greatly dislike the Fisher Price / Vista look.

the qt-copy use flag just pushes into gentoo ebuild the kde.org devs patches. the ammount of ram used while running kde on my system is about 20% less after compiling qt3 and qt4 with this flag. unfortunately after that rebuild you'll have to rebuild kdelibs or you cannot use kde. as for kde4 i'll try it out (it seems that the compile time has dropped really down after passing everything to cmake and has now passed from about 10 hours to less than 6 hours) after i get the new 4.0.3 into portage tree. at the third subversion it should be quite usable. the problem is that i'll still have to drag around the old qt3 for the components that aren't ok on kde4. i'll try out to remove qt3 and see if qt4 with the qt3support use flag could help out.
as for the switch, it's not difficult, and the live installer cd should have you install it in a fair amount of time.