I don't want to step in between, as I have no right to contribute to this conversation, but there's a thought of mine that I wanted to share (especially with
beanpole):
Although at the very first glance Lumina didn't look that great to me, I'm actually liking Lumina more and more with every new update it gets, 1.4 release looks very promising with the new Theme Configuration panel (saw the review). Prior one had to manually modify the few themes available, or use a different bar than Lumina-panel. Lumina mostly resemble my idea of Desktop Environment, which is totally different from anything GTK-related, especially bloated GNOME and KDE. I really enjoy those lighter WM/Qt-based DEs like LXQt or Lumina, to the point I always stick to those (and EDE as well) when I feel like using a pre-configured Desktop.
Lumina is fast, light, simple, very BSD-like (other DE on BSD feel alien).
The ZFS snapshots' bar for Insight, which resembles Solaris Time Slider, is another Lumina's strong point and completely eliminates the non-Unix-like idea of a Trash Can.
The Settings Center is very well organized, keyboard settings allow an in-depth shortcuts configuration, while the lumina-archiver really resembles my beloved Xarchiver, and was therefore, much appreciated.
On the other hand I'll join
Trihexagonal concern about which IMHO are the 2 main faults of this DE:
- right-click menu, despite looking good, really deserves more powerful customization features, possibly making a step back towards more classical floating WMs' menus (or simply adopt a slightly modified version of Fluxbox')
- Insight FM should either:
a) be empowered in its drag & drop, image displaying, navigation options, file operations progress info,open in terminal and open as root features, thus to make a step forward common point&click FMs like, Nemo, Caja.... Still, since those are considerably heavier than Insight and would contrast with the very philosphy and purposes for Lumina, a good compromise would be something like SpaceFM, which I'm a great fan of
b) be improved in its double-pane, keyboard-driven, orthodox, professional info/permission displaying, powerful archive managing features, so as to resemble other great orthodox GUI file managers, like XFE, DoubleCMD, Krusader...
At the actual state, from my point of view, it looks like an incomplete hybrid between those two classes, and maybe that's the reason way so many critics have been risen against it.
Hoped with this to provide useful suggestions,
Best regards,