[lug] Linux for New User (Desktop OS)

[Davide Del Vento]

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 4:31 PM, Michael J. Hammel
<mjhammel at graphics-muse.org> wrote:
> Note that I do NOT use compositing.  I have no
> need for it.  Nor do I do any 3D or gaming.  Just plain ol' 2D desktops
> for writing code.

Same here. My video hw is about 2 years old and is an intel integrated card.
My problem is that, I am often on the go, so my screen changes
continuously and I remember that I gave up on XFCE because it does
work, but you have spend too much time at every switch. Some of my use
cases:

1) work laptop on docking station with two external DVI monitors (lid
closed, because the hardware does not support the third one)
2) go to meeting where I need to present, I bring laptop without
rebooting (too many windows that I don't want to interrupt, it's
already frustrating to have to go to the meeting, having to reboot
also would nudge me to play sick :-)
So I hot-switch to LVDS + VGA (resolutions completely different from
the previous two monitors)
3) back to work as 1) without reboot
4) evening or weekend at home with LVDS + (single) HDMI monitor (with reboot).

Gnome2 aka Mate (from LMDE) supports this beautifully out of the box
without me doing absolutely anything (other than plugging the cables).
Nothing else that I've tried on the same hardware does (I did not try
a recent GNOME3). In particular Xubuntu LTS does not (I have not tried
the very last one). Unfortunately for me, CentOS is "too old" and
Fedora is "too new and requires re-install too often", so I don't plan
to try them (I wish there was a "middle ground" option from that camp)

> Hope that helps a little.

It nudges me to give it a second try, possibly from xubuntu 14.04,
which might have a version where this now work.

Ah, I would also like it to save my windows and restart them at the
next session. IIRC XFCE has a menu with the relevant tickmark, but
it's a no-op. This used to work on mate-LMDE, however some recent
update partially broke it, and it now works only for mate-xxx stuff
(e.g. mate-terminal, mate-text-editor and the likes, it does not work
with firefox, chrome, thunderbird, not even midori or other stuff).
Does this work for you?

Thanks!
Davide