1. Gnome 3 with Gnome Shell

Let’s get the most obvious choice out of the way first. Historically, Ubuntu has always run the Gnome desktop environment. Gnome was one of the first DEs for Linux, and is still going strong. When they recently released version 3, it was a complete overhaul of both the desktop interface and much of the software behind it. Currently, Ubuntu uses Gnome 3′s backend software with the Unity desktop, but if you want the full Gnome 3 experience you need Gnome Shell.

As regular readers may know, we’ve covered Gnome Shell in detail several times before.

Gnome shell can be installed through the Ubuntu Software Center, or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

2. KDE

The other big kid on the block is KDE. It and Gnome have been battling for the Linux desktop for years, each with their own group of avid supporters. As one of the heavyweight contenders, KDE packs a full suite of mature and capable software, a beautiful desktop, and decades of Linux desktop design experience.

All of KDE’s power and flexibility does not come cheap. A full KDE installation is a pretty hefty thing, and for all its fine points, KDE might not be a great option for low end or mobile computers.

KDE can be installed through the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install kde-standard

or if you want, download Kubuntu, which comes with KDE as the default DE.

3. XFCE

For a long time, XFCE was jokingly known as “Gnome Lite”. It uses similar backend software (such as GTK) and has an overall look and feel similar to the Gnome 2.x series. It’s generally regarded as lighter and faster than Gnome, however most of those comparisons were made prior to Gnome 3. Now the two desktops take such vastly different approaches, and such comparisons would have less meaning.

Still, its resemblance to Gnome 2 is much of the reason why many people (including Linus Torvalds himself) have migrated to XFCE due to dissatisfaction with Gnome 3.

XFCE can be installed through the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install xfce4

or download Xubuntu which comes with XFCE.

4. LXDE

A lightweight option that’s been growing in popularity lately is LXDE. It’s a desktop environment built around the OpenBox window manager. It includes several small apps and utilities like the PCManFM file manager and a custom panel and terminal.

LXDE is a fairly nice setup, particularly on lower-end machines, but it’s been this author’s experience that LXDE and its related apps always seem to have the feel of being almost done. If you’re the type of user who likes everything to be smoothly polished, feature-complete, and rock-solid – LXDE might not be great for you. If, however, you need something light, fast, and simple – I highly recommend you try it out. It may not be your dream desktop, but it’s almost there.

LXDE can be installed through the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install lxde

5. Enlightenment (E17)

Once considered a thing of myth and legend, E17 is now a part of Ubuntu 11.10′s online repositories. Many years of development have gone in to this release, and it’s got loads of features. This is a desktop that aims to do it all – high performance, high productivity, extreme flexibility, and loads of eye candy. Chances are it does not much resemble any desktop environment you’ve used before, so if you decide to take the plunge, be prepared for a little bit of a learning curve.

Once you’ve learned to do things the “enlightened” way, it may be tough to switch back. E17 can be installed through the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install e17

Conclusion

Each of these has its own pros and cons. Some people love Gnome 3, some think it’s garbage. Some people use KDE every day, others won’t go near it. The beauty of Linux is that whatever you like, you can have it – for free. If it doesn’t exist, make it. That’s what open source is all about: choice. Hopefully this guide has helped you make yours.

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A Bit About Bodhi

As an Ubuntu spinoff, it’s got the same behind-the-scenes software as your average Ubuntu remix. The two design principles behind Bodhi could be summed up as:

1. Users should make their own choices
2. E17 is cool

It doesn’t bundle in hundreds of helper applications, and the things it does include are generally pretty light. This keeps the ISO around 400MB.

Setting Up the Bodhi Desktop

When you boot the live CD, you’ll notice that you’re given a couple extra options on boot. This is part of the first principle mentioned above – there’s not one default Bodhi desktop, there are several, for different needs.

Once you’ve got past the language screen, you’ll choose which style of desktop you’d like.

We’ll be going with Desktop Light for the examples here, which looks something like this:

Whereas, for the sake of comparison, the Fancy Dark looks like this:

After that you’ll get to an Applications selection screen, but as it’s only got one option (XTerm), it doesn’t take much explanation.

The Quick Launch screen, however is a bit more complicated, as many of the choices are named similarly and give no detailed explanation as to their function. For example, if you wanted to open Nautilus, would you want File Browser, File Management, or File Manager? For the records, File Browser will get the job done.

These applications will be available on a OSX-style dock at the bottom of the screen.

Modules

Much of E17′s functionality is contained in modules. Modules can be controlled from the Module Settings screen (Main Menu -> Settings -> Modules) and control nearly all the interactive aspects of your desktop. The taskbar, desktop monitor, clocks and even the main menu itself are all modules.

Some aspects of E17′s modules can be a bit confusing (such as remembering the difference between and iBox and an iBar) but they all have a purpose. Remember that many modules can exist independently on the desktop as well as from within other modules (like the iBar).

To create a new dock-type launcher bar, for example, you’d open the main menu by left clicking the desktop. From there you’d go to Desktop -> Shelves -> Add a Shelf. Your new shelf will show up on your desktop, where you can right-click it to view it settings and change the contents.

This modular, layered approach leaves Enlightenment open to nearly unlimited flexibility, but can often cause confusion and frustration when trying to get used to the system.

Conclusion

It’s hard to separate Bodhi as a distro from Enlightenment, its defining characteristic. Ubuntu is clearly a quality base to build on, and E17 has been improving for a (very, very) long time now. Along with Elive, Bodhi seems to be one of the few E17-based distros able to make a thoroughly useable system. While there are a few rough spots here and there, Bodhi seems worth while. If you’re willing to put in the time and effort to master Enlightenment (pun intended), this might the the distro for you.

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Getting E17

In the terminal, open the /etc/apt/sources.list file with the following command:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following repo to the end of the file.

#  E17 repo for Karmic
deb http://packages.enlightenment.org/ubuntu karmic main extras

Save and close the file. Type the following commands to install E17:

wget http://packages.enlightenment.org/repo.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install e17

That will do the base install with all needed dependencies. There’s a little bit more you might like to add though, like various modules to enhance the E17 user experience. I’d recommend emodule-bling, emodule-net, and emodule-cpu. If you want to go all out and install ALL the optional modules, try installing emodules-all.

Running

Now that it’s installed, it’s time to give E17 a test run. You can choose it by logging out of your current Gnome session and choosing Enlightenment from the Sessions dropdown box at the bottom of the GDM Login screen. Karmic’s GDM seems a bit strange about exactly when it shows that dropdown box. For me, it seems to work once I’ve selected my username but before entering password.

One of the more unusual things about the current E17 package is that it comes with a first-time setup wizard. It’s just a few options to make sure the desktop is set up correctly on the first run.

Once you’re done with the wizard you should have your basic desktop up and running.

Customizing

Here’s where the real fun begins. For starters, let’s go over the way E17 handles things like the “dock” and items within it. What many UIs would call the dock or panel, Enlightenment calls shelves. A shelf is a container for other objects like launchers, menus, and applets.

To change the contents of the current shelf, right click on some empty space. In the context menu you’ll see shelf 1. Choose Shelf Settings and you’ll have placement options. As a long-time WindowMaker user, I moved my shelf to occupy the right-most edge of the screen. Choose Advanced for more placement options, or choose Set Contents to begin adding/removing/rearranging the items in that shelf.

Even if you installed emodules-all in the earlier step, you may not see much in the Set Contents screen. That’s because we haven’t made those modules active yet. To start and stop any E17 modules, left-click the desktop to bring up the main menu and choose Settings > Modules. From there you can load whichever modules you like. Depending on what the particular module is supposed to do, it may have an immediate effect, or it may just give another option when you go to add items to your shelves. I recommend using extra modules sparingly, as some of them are not entirely stable.

You can get to the main Settings tool by left-clicking the desktop to bring up the menu, where you’ll find Settings > Settings Panel. This panel gives a wide variety of config options, so take your time and browse through.

You can also add various E17 gadgets directly on to the desktop. Left click to pull the menu back up, go back to Settings, and choose Gadgets. You’ll see various gadgets that can be embedded into the desktop.

Once you know how to work with the Settings Panel, gadgets, and modules, you should be well on your way to building your perfect E17 desktop.

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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.

Testing it out

As the same as any other distros, Elive comes with a live CD that you can use to boot up (and test) in your computer. When you first boot up the Live CD, it automatically detects your hardware and auto-configures it for optimum setting.

If you are using hardware that requires the restricted driver, such as broadcom wireless card and nVidia graphics card, Elive will also prompt you to install the necessary drivers so you can use your hardware straight away. I was happy that it is able to configure my Broadcom wireless card correctly during the boot up. This is one of the few distros that I can boot it up and connect to the Internet straight away, without any configuration or driver installation.

In addition, if you are dualbooting with a Windows partition, or are testing out Elive on your Windows-only computer, Elive will ask if you want to mount the NTFS partition on boot up.

The Frontend

Once you reach the desktop, you will be greeted with the familiar Enlightenment desktop environment (or unfamiliar if you are used to Gnome or KDE). The first thing that you will find missing is the panel (aka as menu or application bar). In case you don’t know, there is no application bar in Enlightenment. You simply click your mouse anywhere on the desktop to access the menu and applications. In my opinion, this is a much cleaner and faster way to manage your applications.

The layout of the desktop is well designed, with clever use of the various corners.

At the bottom of the screen is the e17 iconbar (also known as IBar) that serves as a dock for your frequently used applications.

The left bottom corner is the Xpad where you can quickly fire up to input a short note or access your todo list.

The right bottom is where all the gadgets reside. You are free to add/remove any of the gadgets from the shelf. I particularly like the Internet Configurator that cleverly detect my wireless network without much configuration.

The top right corner is where you can access any of the 12 virtual desktops in Elive. Note that you can easily move an active window to any of the virtual desktop by dragging it to the edges, including the corner. The transition from a desktop to another is seamless. You don’t even notice the differences. Also, one of the best thing that I find it difficult to implement in Gnome is that you can set a different wallpaper for each virtual desktop.

Accessing minimized windows

As mentioned above, there is no menu bar in Enlightenment. When you minimize a window, it will turn into an icon on the desktop instead. To retrieve the window, simply click on the icon and it will maxmize back to its original size.

The following screenshot shows the iconify windows, Xpad todo list, active windows in different virtual desktop and accessing the menu by mouse-clicking on the desktop.

On the application side, some of you (especially me) might be disappointed by the exclusion of OpenOffice. Abiword is used as the default office suite instead. Luckily this distro is Debian-based, so installing OpenOffice on it is just a breeze. The file manager used is Thundar, which is a great replacement for the commonly used Nautilus. Other applications include:

• XMMS
• Mplayer
• Iceweasal (a Debian rebrand of Firefox)
• GIMP
• aMSN
• Skype
• Transmission torrent client
• Avidemux
• Acidrip
• xine
• poedit
• scite text editor
• and many more

On the gaming side, I am surprise to find a collection of several good and interesting games. The Torus Trooper and Tuxpack are two great games that I have wasted countless hours playing. Yes, if you are missing your old console games, the ZSNES Nintendo Emulator, ScummVm and Dosbox emulator are also included.

The backend

On the configuration side, Elive has created beautiful and user-friendly GUI for its user to configure and change any of the system setting. It might take some exploration to find out where all the configuration options are, but once you got that sorted out, everything is just a simple click and select.

On the IBar, there is the Elive Panel where you can access and configure most of the system stuffs. The configuration options are categoried into three main areas:

• Look and feel setting – the place where you customize the desktop theme and overall look and feel.
• Personal settings – the place to personalize your settings, like which applications to load on startup.
• Systems settings – This is where you configure the system setting.

All the configuration options are nicely laid out and there are little chance that you need to hit the terminal to fix things up.

Installation

There are three mode of installation that you can select from: Novice, Normal and Advanced. I must admit that even the Novice mode is not as straight forward as Ubuntu. There are several things that Elive do before installing: partition your hard disk, download the installer file, verifying the system, verifying the installer source. At times, it will prompt you to enter information such as the security code, your username, password etc, which can be quite a hassle.

Various version of Elive

There are currently two version of Elive that are under development: standard Elive and Elive Ecomorph.

The Ecomorph version is a special version that is coupled with Compiz. If you think that Debian + e17 is great, then Debian + e17 + Compiz is even better.

Here is a video on Ecomorph:

Both the development versions are free to download, but are not stable enough for daily usage.

For the existing stable version of Elive, it is more of a donation-ware rather than a freeware. You have to donate (any amount) before you can download the LiveCD.

Invite

Alternatively, you can get invitation codes from your friends who used Elive. For MakeTechEasier readers, on courtesy of EliveTeam, we have 5 invites ready to be given away. If you are interested to try out and install Elive (stable), be among the first to leave your comment below. Remember to include your name and email address.

Conclusion

Elive is a great distro that gives you functionality, stability and beauty. While there are a few other distros that are based on the Enlightenement desktop manager, this is so far the most elegant distro that I have ever encountered. I am pretty impressed by it and I guess it will remain on my computer for a much longer time than any other OS.

For those who want to try out Elive, here are the links:

Elive (stable)

standard Elive (development)

Elive Ecomorph (Compiz)

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