Openbox and the minimal Desktop

I've had some good success recently with the Openbox window manager, which prides itself on being fast and light-weight as compared to the more widely used Gnome and KDE. Openbox is nearly nothing but the bare minimum, and I think that's all I need.

The machine in question is a PowerMac 3500 laptop, aka the "original" G3 Powerbook. The machine was al the rage in 1997, so by now it's understandably a bit limited in its capabilities. Initially I ran Debian on it, and used the Gnome desktop environment. Programs launched slowly and the machine was generally poky, but it worked. Then I switched to Yellow Dog Linux in the hopes of a more recent kernel (something I couldn't get working with Debian). There I used KDE, and noticed a bit more all around pep.

But I'm coming back to Debian now for all the extra software it makes available, and also for the fact that in exchange for the newer kernel Yellow Dog took away the laptop's ability to wake up from sleep. I spent at least an hour trying to figure out why Openbox wasn't running. It turns out everything was running just fine. Openbox doesn't have the usual accoutrements that you normally associate with a desktop environment. There's no toolbar at the bottom of the screen (although I'm not sure if this is the way it's supposed to be), no icons on the desktop, no clock in the bottom right corner. Just a single menu that pops up when you right-click that has submenus to various applications and things you might want or need.

You can certainly add in the clock and the taskbar and whatever else you like, but in its natural form Openbox is basics-only. If you can adjust to that kind of setup, or even be more productive as an indirect result, what does that say about all the cruft that normally wastes desktop space? I'm as much a fan of organization as the next person, yet whether on Mac or Windows my desktop has almost always been a clearing house for junk: bookmarks of pages I need to reread or do something with, downloaded applications I need to install, shortcuts to folders and applications I need fast access to. Plus menus, whether important (the Windows Start menu, which has the Shut Down option) or unimportant (the rest of the Start menu, a clearing house for any application I've ever installed that wanted to make an appearance, regardless of whether it was deserved).

The desktop metaphor is involved with all GUI-related interaction between humans and personal computers. It's not the sort of thing you can dump entirely unless you make the command prompt the beginning and end point of your computing experience. And on older machines, you feel the limitations of the desktop even faster. All the little things still add up to a noticeable resource drain.

Gnome, KDE, Windows, and to a lesser extent OSX are all very similar in terms of their user experience. The frills are different here and there, but by and large you take them for what they are and maybe pare them down if you're interested in simplicity. Openbox starts at that lower simplicity and lets you build upward. It lets you think about a very simple question: How little can I get away with?

In my case, I'm still figuring that out. I certainly need a web browser. And I certainly need a command prompt to type commands into. And a text editor, and an image editing program. Maybe an office suite too. Probably a music player. Almost everything else I need within Linux is a faceless server that has no natural GUI. I'm sure I'm leaving a few things out, but how many GUI programs does that make? Less than 10? Definitely less than 20.

But my Windows start menu easily has twice that many. And I've got a toolbar with additional shortcuts to 26 programs I really do use. The shortcuts are necessary because they are the fastest launching option. It's always about fast access. Pretty soon your whole desktop becomes a junk pile in the name of fast access. But if application shortcuts and desktop icons were a luxury, you'd be forced to do things differently, maybe even better. You might not get caught in the weaknesses of the desktop metaphor the way you do now, or at least not the same ones.