Debian goes retro with a spatial desktop that time forgot The Desktop Classic System is a rather unusual hand-built flavor of Debian featuring a meticulously configured spatial desktop layout and a pleasingly 20th-century look and feel. DCS, as project creator "Mycophobia" calls it, has been around in one form or another since 2023, but it came to the attention of The Reg FOSS desk …
Very much in favour of remembering location and size of windows. Tiling window managers(manglers) totally destroy muscle memory and fail miserably on things like Software synthesiser displays. Who wants oval volume controls or sliders that either become fat and stubby or elongated and too thin to get a grip on... to say nothing of messing up waveform displays?
Oh, and just repositioning objects in a window is just as bad, as then you can never find anything!
Perhaps I don't get the novelty, but...
Have 3 boxen with Trixie and xfce 4.20 here. Yes, I know, probably nothing for fluff beards and thumb typists. But...
It very much remembers icon positions. Stock. Out of the box.
So much so actually that .config/xfce4/desktop/icons.screen0.yaml grows massively fat on all the entries/ locations it saves.
If you use your Desktop actively. Which also seems to be geriatric behaviour..? ;)))
> It very much remembers icon positions. Stock. Out of the box.
Does it remember window positions, though?
It did occur to me as I explored that Xfce could probably do all this and more, and I personally prefer Xfce to MATE. It's smaller, faster, more versatile, and it can do vertical panels properly which MATE can't.
I particularly like the 3D Skeuomorphic appearance in the screenshots. I had to zoom in, but it seems to be there.
Now, if we can somehow force the re-appearance of classic menus AND eliminate the [swear, spit] HAMBURGER menu for all [compliant] GTK-based applications, I'd be STOKED!
As for the oval [Adwaita] scrollbars [especially self-hiding ones] you mentioned, I have NOTHING but CONTEMPT. Adwaita should be killed to death by burning with FLAMES of FIRE.
Didn't many older Window Managers have that facility built in? E.g., I still run Fluxbox, which has quite fine-grained control of remembering (or not) window placement, dimensions and other window attributes. This is configured via the window titlebar, or through the (text) ./fluxbox/apps file. Damn useful feature.
> Didn't many older Window Managers have that facility built in?
Honestly I am not sure, but the thing is that a window manager by definition doesn't have a file manager, and the primary point of this functionality is storing and recalling icon positions and the size, location, and view setting of filer windows.
So if there are no filer windows, TBH I don't see what's left as being terribly useful.
Oh, I still find it very useful. I work on multiple workspaces—e.g., one for web browsing, one for coding, one for writing-up, one for document browsing, one for file and data management, one for remote machine access, one for admin tasks, and so on—and each of those workspaces will be set up with windows arranged according to a scheme that's evolved over the years, so it's handy to have windows remember their placement and dimensions. It's a very efficient and ergonomic organisation that suits the nature of my work (I'm a research scientist).
My "file manager" is basically ls, mv, cp, rm, find … in a terminal. I'm largely terminal/keyboard-driven. I don't use desktop icons – never found them useful, as they're by definition almost always [partly] obscured by windows, and I find repeatedly having to expose/restore a workspace to access applications or files disruptive and un-ergonomic. I don't run a desktop as such, though Fluxbox has a taskbar, system tray, dock, menus and keyboard shortcut management; I access applications via menus or keyboard shortcuts. So the icon and file manager stuff is largely irrelevant to me.
As always, different strokes for different folk.
As an aside, I did use Rox Filer for a time, and occasionally still do. As file management tools go it's pretty neat.
Nearly all of them. It was essentially necessary when a toolbar running the length of your screen and applications living entirely in one window weren't a thing.
I'm not even sure why this is considered rare, both KDE and Gnome do the same on XOrg. It's only the fight over Wayland protocols that has made it uncommon recently.
Create Generation 2 VM (UEFI support).
Add second 8GB HD Boot Disk.
Set boot order with Boot Disk first.
Disable Secure Boot.
Do not start VM.
Mount and FAT-format Boot Disk in Disk Management.
Copy zip content to Boot Disk.
Unmount Boot Disk.
Boot VM.
Install guest OS.
Change boot order.
Definitely a distro worth looking at (it drives me bonkers when Windows suddenly decides to rearrange things: that group of icons are all Python-related, OBS and multimedia are grouped here... Oops, the power has gone off on that monitor, fixed it, now WTF just happened to my desktop?).
But also for your highlighting of the references about spatial desktops and the article "The Decline of Usability".
Although, that last article did miss something: when talking about how, in the Good Old Days, you could just grab an edge or corner to resize a window under Windows, it omitted the ridiculousness of how nowadays you are expected to NOT grab a visible edge or corner, but now have to miss those edges & corners. But don't miss too much, or you'll click on the window below! I was utterly gobsmacked when the Raspberry Pi people, which I usually admire, congratulated themselves on spending time and energy to make the R'Pi desktop do precisely the same moronic thing. Why quickly aim for a clearly visible corner when you can slowly move the mouse around sort of where you think the corner would be, if it were being drawn, keeping a careful eye on what shape the pointer is; ok, about here, now feel for the midpoint so it won't go wrong if I jog the mouse ever so slightly when clicking. Gently, gently - shit!
> Thanks for bringing this to our attention
I'm glad you liked it!
I'd love to see some other contributors come on board and maybe help her add an ISO image, legacy BIOS boot support (it's about 3 files and it's stock in Debian), and an optional menu bar.
> But also for your highlighting of the references about spatial desktops and the article "The Decline of Usability".
I am getting some personal abuse for this, as usual, from the GNOME fans.
It needs to be said. There needs to be pushback. A lot of the millennial types do not understand what they are removing.
> Although, that last article did miss something: when talking about how, in the Good Old Days, you could just grab an edge or corner to resize a window under Windows
True. That was specifically a thing of Windows and its direct relatives, OS/2 and Motif (which licensed the design of controls).
There were other models: NeXT let you use either bottom-left or bottom-right corners but only them. Mac, GEM, Amiga, others just nominated bottom right corner only.
> I was utterly gobsmacked when the Raspberry Pi people, which I usually admire, congratulated themselves on spending time and energy to make the R'Pi desktop do precisely the same moronic thing.
Agreed. A lot of effort and work went into Wayland and all it really does is remove stuff people want and use.
and what is wrong with a CLI? Bash preferably, but I'll live with Zsh. I'm not a total masochist, I will often make my life easier by using things like "standard" Markup/Markdown editing and nano instead of Vim...
Mine's the one with "Unix – A history and a Memoir" in the pocket >>=====>
Choice is good.
My introduction to small computers was the Acorn Archimedes and then an iBook running system 8 something. This looks interesting. I'm especially interested in the extent to which I can iconise windows to the desktop.
Quote from DCS web site
"In the default Icon view mode, you can place files within a folder anywhere within that folder; no sortation is mandatory."
Wondering if a grid alignment is forced or if you can group icons by task. One way to find out I suppose.
Someone on the social netz highlighted a nice "long read" article about the history of Markdown just the other day (basically telling the story of how an as-simple-as-it-can-be 'grassroots' text format became indispensible):
> using gparted to make it bootable
Gparted can only make a _partition_ bootable.
The legacy-BIOS boot process requires more than just that: it also needs a boot sector, then boot files in the first few sectors of the disk. Gparted can't provide those.
The Linux kernel for years contained its own bootloader: if you just DDed a raw kernel onto an unformatted floppy, the first 1 kB or so contained the right code in the right order that a BIOS would boot it.
It was removed years ago because [a] who uses floppies in the 2020s? and [b] the kernel won't fit onto a floppy any more.
> The legacy-BIOS boot process requires more than just that: it also needs a boot sector
It very much also depends on the boot medium.
The first sector of the hard disk (the Master Boot Record - MBR) contains the primary boot loader, along with the definitions of the 4 primary partitions. In the old DOS days this code could be created with "FDISK /MBR". At power on time the BIOS would read the MBR sector (signature, code, partition table) into memory then execute it.
It was then up to those 440-ish bytes of code to find (from the in-memory partition table) the secondary boot loader for the active partition. This was generally the first few sectors of that partition and was OS specific. The DOS loader would know enough to find IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM; all this could be written with the "SYS" command. More complicated loaders, such as LILO and then GRUB could do a lot lot more.
A floppy disk boot skipped that MBR process ('cos no partitions) and went straight to the OS specific boot loader, loading from the first sector of the disk. As you noted, older Linux kernels had this boot loader code at the beginning so it could be raw-written to a floppy. eg the 0.11 boot+root disks; the boot disk held the boot sector and the kernel, and then you switched that out for the root disk once the kernel had loaded.
All these sectors were loaded in using BIOS calls, and in the early days the C/H/S definitions led to the 500MB limit for the C: drive (although older DOS - eg 3.3 - had a 20MB limit, anyway); it wasn't until LBA mode came along that we could handle larger disks. The LILO secondary files all had to live within that first 500Mbyte of disk 'cos it still used the BIOS to load them, hence the common setup of having /boot being a separate partition at the beginning of the disk when dealing with larger disks.
Really old PCs couldn't boot from CD and hadn't even heard of USB :-) That's why the older Windows CD also came with a boot floppy!
recently had trouble with a few-years-old HP box with a 2016 BIOS that could not directly boot FBSD on an 8TB drive (2TB worked fine). 8TB uses gpart since traditional DOS-like partitioning won't work. I had to leave an "ultimate boot" CD in the drive so I could reliably boot it. Just pointing that out... and it has a 3.2Ghz Intel CPU and came with Win-10-nic so is not THAT old. VirtualBox booted with no problem when I was building the new drive. [worthy of mention on BIOS bootup and older hardware]
Everything should do this by default.
Some programs do and some don't on my Mate Desktop (Mint) which looks a bit Win2K to Server 2003 style.
Programs that ignore the system and do their own (usually stupid) style of scrollbars, tabs, checkboxes, menu etc are REALLY Annoying, like current Thunderbird, Firefox, "Disks" and Viber.
I have bars on three sides that autohide:
Top is menu, terminal, kill, System info/Windows list
Bottom is workspaces, shutdown, lock, logout, taskbar icons, time-date etc.
Left is "quick launch" of Local programs
Right isn't autohide, so as to not mess up a 2nd screen (because hide stupidly moves the places bar rather than collapsing it) and is quick launch of Remote stuff,, such as email, browsers, packages, filezilla, PuTTY, connect to Server etc.
You can't make your OS/Desktop be fully "spatial". Some programs are ill behaved.
I think, if I have understood karlkarl's comment correctly, that the page below from Mycophobia's Web site might help clarify her modifications to Caja to enhance its spatial mode inherited from Gnome 2.0's nautilus.
https://mycophobia.org/spatial_nautilus/index.html
I think that Mycophobia is reaching back to before MacOS X to the original system finder.
Just when you thought it was about as bad as it was going to get (I did like the link in the article to "The Decline of Usability"), Apple has somehow managed to screw up resizing windows in Tahoe.
As far as I'm concerned there only has to be two themes on Linux - one like Windows 2000 and one like Snow Leopard. It may be retro but it works.
Oh, so Apple is doing the same mistakes Microsoft did with Windows 11, which started with Windows 8...
I really want my visible borders back, 4 pixels wide for todays resolution, and the divider bar (in every mmc) 4 pixel wide too, and the visible hint on the lower right to show where to grab to resize.
Even worse for administrators, since the mouse cursor does nto change over nested rdp-citrix-rdp etc... Seriously, I do believe that the current Microsoft Administration has a deep hate for Administrators.
Window title bars are sparse too. There's a close box at the right end, as is fairly standard these days. On the left are two buttons we see much less. The leftmost is a "roll up" button
I first encountered that with OpenLook which supports maximize, iconize, close and roll up — configurably. After accidentally closing a window once too often I exiled the close button to the the top left corner and the iconize, maximize and roll up to the right hand corner. I find the roll up feature quite useful for text windows displaying man pages, configuration and header files, etc. — easier than searching for the right icon on the taskbar/panel (tint2.)
Curious: what is the second button of which we see much less "On the left are two buttons we see much less." ? Resize ?
Thanks for the coverage! I would like to have a global menu bar in that big empty space but as you found out it's a huge pain to make work properly. I would have to patch toolkits Unity-style and that's just more hacking than I'm really comfortable with. Moreover, there does need to be a function for omnipresent quick access for arbitrary items (not just applications, as in the Brisk menu's Favourites section), but the weakness here of course is that you just kind of get *a lot* of it, depending on your screen resolution. Labels for panel launchers would be a big improvement, both in terms of usability and in terms of taking up more space when you drag and drop files/folders/apps up there, but also requires patching the panel. Maybe next release :D
> well it uses atp so that's an instant thanks but no thanks.
I was going to make some gag that I ran on Adenosine Triphosphate myself, and so do you, but it's only going to work for that rare compsci/biology intersection...
I then was going to ask what ATP *you* meant... but in typing that, I realised: APT.
What's wrong with APT? I prefer it to bloody Pacman any day, thanks. And Zypper. And DNF.
I do have to take some exception with the coverage here, as nice as it is, in that it doesn't cover AppManager at all; it just jumps right into adding a repository via the terminal and installing Firefox via the terminal, and it also shows a bunch of open folders from the root filesystem, and the pesky default xdg-user-dirs have been reconstructed in the home folder. To be clear, I wouldn't want to make it impossible to do any of these things, it's your computer after all, but it is a tad against the spirit of the project and maybe gives an inaccurate first impression...
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