It has always seemed strange to me too. I have just always chalked it up to being an ubuntu thing.[1] I don't know if it has caught on in other distro-ecosystems but it seemed like it started with Ubuntu; which was peculiar because you do not have to deal with dependency hell--you have apt right there in that little black box!
The other ubuntu curiosity is installing `command-not-found` by default? I never thought you could have something worse than /usr/games/sl in your path, but then ubuntu introduced me to `command-not-found`.
I find `command-not-found``a lot more useful than `sl` (sl is some ascii animation that'll be shown for a short/long while if you write it).
Usually when I get to `command-not-found` it's something I haven't installed on a new system somewhere and I've found it helpful at times. It rarely annoys me.
From what I understand, "sl" was engineered to train new users into typing correctly, by putting them back on track to their final destination, instead of railroading them into promptly installing and running new commands. Only a fascist would force them to run on time.
If I mistype something, it takes ages for command-not-found to search the entire Internet for “emacss” or whatever, during which I am slowly driven mad by the system punishing me and forcing me to wait.
Ah, that makes sense, the version on my machine runs off the local apt/dpkg database, so I was wondering why why you'd consider it worse than sl. (It does spew several lines of noise, but that's less of a problem when you have a sixty-somthing line terminal and barely a problem at all when you've got scrollback.)
What would you estimate is the ratio of typos versus "thought it was installed"? Personally mine is probably 1,000 to 1. If I type a command and bash says command not found I know the program is not installed. If I need that program I am a big boy and can use apt without anyone holding my hand.
You can do that too, although I have had an ... interesting experience jumping around desktop environments on Ubuntu. I'm not sure what exactly is happening, but some kind of config information is steadily bleeding between them every time I do a system update.
Sometimes if I pull up KDE (which I don't usually, since I found xfce), the panel will have as many as three different sound menus, only one of which is actually functional.
From looking at the Gnome Developer page "Desktop files: putting your application in the desktop menus" [1], it seems that it wasn't designed to work correctly with more than one desktop installed. This isn't surprising as it's an uncommon use case. [Edit: This is incorrect, see below]
For example, on a system running 13.04 with MATE installed, the Graphics menu has entries for Image Viewer (Eye of Gnome, the default) and Eye of MATE Image Viewer (MATE's port of eog).
Looking in /usr/share/applications there are the two corresponding .desktop files:
Xubuntu is just a set of packages for Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu LTS and one of the first things I do on a new install is sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop .
Now, if you're on RHEL then Xubuntu would be a bit of a leap, but just installing xfce on Ubuntu is going to be a lot more painful than installing xubuntu-desktop which has a little more functionality out of the box.
What is significantly different? I looked on the xubuntu site and I could not find much information. I did not realize that xubuntu was a lot different than normal ubuntu with xfce4 installed.
RHEL is primarily a server, not a desktop. All the desktops are in the repos already though, and Fedora has offical spins if you don't want to install them yourself for some reason. Gnome, MATE, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, it just takes one command to group install.
