I've been using Xfce for many years on all my Linux systems, both large and small. I got completely sick of the gratuitous bloatware that GNOME and KDE have become over the years. And then GNOME 3 completely did away with my desktop, replacing it with something strange and confusing.
For quite a long time, I went back to completely "old school" and used Fvwm as my window manager. Although a heavyweight WM back in the 90's, it's really lightweight by today's standards.
I would still be using Fvwm today if not for the need to use USB flash drives. Unlike "normal" devices like SCSI and ATA hard drives, the device name for a USB device is not really predictable until after the device is inserted. To manually issue a "mount" command for a USB drive requires insane amounts of investigation in order to figure out what that device's name actually is.
So I was forced to finally switch to a window manager with an integrated "desktop" that can respond to the UBS-insert dbus calls, displaying drive icons for my USB devices. After discovering that GNOME and KDE were even more bloated than they were when I last abandoned them, I looked for alternatives. I found LXDE to be a bit too minimal for me, but Xfce was almost perfect - I got the desktop I needed, a UI very close to classic GNOME, and a relatively lightweight footprint.
Emacs isn't just a text editor. It's a complete LISP-based application environment. Back when I spent a lot more time on terminal-type interfaces, I used it for e-mail, reading USENET news and even web browsing.
I still think Gnus is one of the best news readers out there, but unfortunately there are no more major ISP's providing news servers to connect to (and I never got around to subscribing to a third-party service).
Authored Comments
I've been using Xfce for many years on all my Linux systems, both large and small. I got completely sick of the gratuitous bloatware that GNOME and KDE have become over the years. And then GNOME 3 completely did away with my desktop, replacing it with something strange and confusing.
For quite a long time, I went back to completely "old school" and used Fvwm as my window manager. Although a heavyweight WM back in the 90's, it's really lightweight by today's standards.
I would still be using Fvwm today if not for the need to use USB flash drives. Unlike "normal" devices like SCSI and ATA hard drives, the device name for a USB device is not really predictable until after the device is inserted. To manually issue a "mount" command for a USB drive requires insane amounts of investigation in order to figure out what that device's name actually is.
So I was forced to finally switch to a window manager with an integrated "desktop" that can respond to the UBS-insert dbus calls, displaying drive icons for my USB devices. After discovering that GNOME and KDE were even more bloated than they were when I last abandoned them, I looked for alternatives. I found LXDE to be a bit too minimal for me, but Xfce was almost perfect - I got the desktop I needed, a UI very close to classic GNOME, and a relatively lightweight footprint.
Emacs isn't just a text editor. It's a complete LISP-based application environment. Back when I spent a lot more time on terminal-type interfaces, I used it for e-mail, reading USENET news and even web browsing.
I still think Gnus is one of the best news readers out there, but unfortunately there are no more major ISP's providing news servers to connect to (and I never got around to subscribing to a third-party service).