However, if you use a desktop manager such as Xfce, the file manager (Thunar in this case) is built in and can be configured with traditional double window arrangement.
No, not really.
It’s got that sense of actually knowing WTF your machine is doing that’s so hard to come by these days, but isn’t masochistically awkward to use (I ran Gentoo for a long time :-) )
If Macs ever go to shit, Void’s my current frontrunner for a Linux distro if I can’t get FreeBSD working ok on a laptop.
Plus you can also open a web browser if you want to goof around and comment on HN.
And you’ll even have X installed if somebody manages to find some use for non-terminal programs (unlikely but we should admit the possibility).
Plus there's the coolness points about doing this without X: https://ykonstant1.github.io/fbvoid.png
For games, I have had some success startx'ing some in their own X context.
Also, on games:
export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=fbcon or kmsdrm depending on the case.
You keep picking lone distros that have tiny communities. If you use something Nice, it might actually be nice.
Feeling like you are judging Linux Desktop from some obscure view.
A Linux so small that I understand what everything’s doing is about the only kind I can tolerate. It’s too messy and janky for the hands-off “just works”. Always was, really, I just didn’t recognize how much time I was losing to it until I experienced not having that time-suck then tried to go back—death by a million cuts.
Last time I tried KDE in Fedora, I could make multiple apps crash just by attempting drag & drop onto them. JFC. A program crashes, like, maybe once a year in the world I’m used to. I’m not sure the average has even been that high.
That's not normal, common or at all representative of the distro or Linux on desktop in general.
I will note that I didn’t realize how much I’d gotten used to working around or working past problems without even noticing I was doing it, until I was no longer using graphical Linux regularly. I am 100% sure I’d have delivered a huge underestimate of the crap I was putting up with, had someone asked me before I switched. Only when trying to go back was it clear what I’d been doing.
You seem a but unreliable too, like you have an axe to grind.
No one else is running into these issues unless they are on debian-family.
I specifically find complex Linux distros very unpleasant. If they worked really well, that wouldn’t be the case. Simple ones where I know what each process ps outputs is doing, and where its config file lives, are… well, they don’t do as much automatically, obviously, so they’re not as nice as a Mac, but at least I can fix them when they act up without going on a damn odyssey.
Needless to say: when I'm on my wife's Ubuntu desktop, it feels very heavy compared to my very minimalistic Debian / Xorg / tiling WM.
I really like those simple desktop environment where you have a good understanding of the machine you are using. I do use ranger as file manager, it is heavier than walk, but it is very capable and scriptable while staying quite simple.