recently moved from mint cinnamon to solus budgie and never realized how much i needed auto-hide on the panel
i really liked budgie but just couldn't handle having the panel in full view causing me to change to mate.
So whats your 1 thing you cant do without?
Firefox Nightly, apparently. Since a few days ago. It's so much ridiculously faster than stable release, I'm probably never going back.
Full page menu launcher and a dock.
i.e. Gnome and OSX.
I spend a lot of time at my computer. Eye strain is the big issue for me. Eons ago I ended up servicing my first mac machine, and after a long day of backing up the clients files, I noticed my eyes did not hurt. I figured out that I wasn't straining my eyes to look at the app menu or the dock like I was with the start menu and task bar in windows.
Ever since then, I have been a dock guy.
Stability and efficiency.
Granted, it's old, but my Thinkpad was getting really sluggish, ran hot, displayed 50+% activity on all four cores when playing audio files, ran through the battery like a warm knife through butter and the desktop (Mint/Cinnamon) would crash every two to three days.
I started shopping for a replacement machine, but decided to look for a light weight distro in the interim. That's when I stumbled upon Solus/Budgie. It solved all of my problems and breathed new life into my laptop. Sure I'll have to replace it eventually, but certainly not in the immediate future. It runs great!
As if this wasn't good enough, there's Solus/Mate for truly ancient hardware.
TL:DR - Solus is my one thing. It's lightweight and efficient and yet it's still full-featured.
Using the super/meta key as a launcher and typing to find a program. I don't want to move my mouse to the corner to click only to switch over to the keyboard again.
Granted, since I've found Albert, it's been a lot easier. But it's really not the same.
Also keyboard shortcuts to launch programs.
An IDE with a good Linter. Sublime Text & Flake8 is my preference for Python right now.
Drop-down terminal, maybe the key factor I'm on gnome 98% of the time
I found that guake is a pretty good alternative if you want to switch away from gnome.
For me it is shelltile, budgie doesn't have native four corner window snapping, so I just make do until someone refers me to a application that can solve my issue
Yeah, I'm aware of yakuake and the likes and making your own, but had to name 1 thing lol
Yeah drop down terminal is nice, dock is a must have,
XFCE has a dropdown built in, for the dock I use docky.
This for me as well. Can't live without it.
Closely followed by a clean set of icons for the taskbar and file explorer, I like my folders to look like folders. It's easy to change but I always appreciate a distro that is easy to look at out of the box - not just about looks, some icon sets really lead my eye astray.
Yep. I rebound the launcher that defaults to alt+f2 to win+d since I moved away from window managers. I also have win for the application menu with a search bar.
As far as what's my personal requirement, it's definitely going to have to be qemu. If your distro doesn't support VMs, I'm not even going to be looking at it.
I work with openstack on a daily basis and create images probably once a week. That requires qemu and virt-manager.
A shell with network access.