Back in my earlier Linux days, I would experiment and fiddle a lot with different setups for desktop environments and appearance, customising my Linux system to my heart’s content! An example: I loved the 3D desktop effects of Xgl/Compiz back in 2006.

Time moved on, and I ended up settling with the defaults that distributions provided. I liked Ubuntu’s direction with Unity, upon its release in 2011.

I have fallen out with Ubuntu and Unity more recently, however. The troubling privacy issues with the Amazon ‘lens’ and other changes to their corporate behaviour scared me off.

So, I moved over to Debian for my personal server and my Linux desktop systems, and I have been very happy with it. At the same time, though, I wanted to get back to my previous spirit of playing around with different bits of software instead of just going with the defaults and surrendering to a full-size desktop environment. Frankly, the way I use Linux means I don’t find an overwhelming need for a wide variety of graphical applications.

With that in mind, I have set up a very unusual, and minimalist, desktop experience, which I thought I would document a little here for those that might be interested.

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So Leopard is here and it is very very nice. I haven’t had an awful lot of time to actually sit down and just play – it’s mostly copying stuff from my backup over, getting things running smoothly again. I will report back with thoughts later!

As you can see, Spotlight is furiously re-indexing all the stuff I just copied, so it is pegging my CPU (usually just one of the cores though, so it’s still snappy and responsive) and making it very very hot (see the menubar for the CPU core temperature)!

More Leopard stuff soon.