Since the release of KDE4, a major overhaul of the KDE desktop, there’s been some grumbling among the Gnome community about if and when Gnome would have a major overhaul. Well with Gnome 3 we’ll have it in the form of Gnome Shell. It pretty much replaces the panel and window manager in a normal Gnome installation with a fully composited environment with some great new functionality.

I love placing all the shortcut icons and files on my Desktop because it allows me to access to my data quickly and save me the trouble of searching for it in Nautilus.

On the other hand, I also have a passion for clean desktop. I have a huge collection of beautiful wallpapers and I love to set my desktop to rotate the wallpaper every 30 minutes. It is my source of inspiration and seeing the beautiful wallpaper allows me to relax whenever I am too stress out from my work.

Apparently, having a lot of desktop shortcuts and a clean beautiful desktop together is not quite possible. I need a solution, a method that allows me to clean up my Desktop, yet allows me to access to my shortcut icons and files quickly.

What do you get when you put a stable operating system, an innovative desktop manager and plenty of eye candies together? You get nothing short of a beautiful and functional OS.

Elive is a Debian-based Linux distro, customized with Enlightenment e17 desktop manager. It is designed with the aim of providing a stable, fully functional and beautiful operating system that can run with minimal hardware requirement.

The current stable version is based on Debian-etch while the version that is under development is based on the recently released Lenny. Knowing the stability and versatility of Debian and the elegant and simplicity of Enlightenment, there are little things that Elive can go wrong.

If you have installed CompizConfig Setting Manager in you Ubuntu, you can easily activate the widget-layer plugin and hide/show your desktop widgets in a Mac dashboard style.

In addition, with some simple configuration, you can also turn any windows/applications into widgets so that they can run in the background (such as playing music) without messing up your desktop. This can also be very useful if you are frequently watching/reading porn confidential stuffs. When someone (such as your boss) walks in, you can quickly hide it without them seeing it.