Dropping Base X group? [Was: Re: KDE logout options with F8]

[Matej Cepl]

On Mon, 05 Nov 2007 02:02:39 +0100, Patrice Dumas scripst:
> I am a small desktop user. For the display managers, there are wdm, xdm
> and slim (but they lack integration with consolekit).

davidz? How complicated is to fix that? Does {wdm,slim} use PAM?

> For the desktop
> (in fact window managers), fvwm, fluxbox, icewm, WindowMaker pekwm and
> other I forgot about.

I would suspect, that here is the answer -- just pick one (although 
WindowMaker means much more than just a window manager, I guess).

> (I don't want to maintain it in fedora since I am upstream).

As other people noted already, this in itself is not the reason. You may 
be swamped in other work too much anyway, so you won't bother with Fedora 
clueless users, but there are many upstream maintainers/authors who 
maintain their packages in Fedora as well.

> For openoffice, I haven't seen obvious replacements

I think, just don't go there -- although KOffice friends will hate me for 
saying this, if you need compatibility with MS Office or full-blown 
office suite, you need OO.o. Period. Others are just not there (yet?). 

And of course, when you say OO.o, don't say "lightweight" in the same 
sentence, or you will be laughed out. I guess that for now, people using 
your virtual DE will have to settle on Google Apps or something of that 
sort. I know, Google Apps are not free, but for now (until some free web 
apps will develop?), it is used I guess by people who don't use full-
blown office suite anyway.

> To replace
> firefox, there is dillo, but it lacks functionalities, more promising is
> links-hacked (I have a spec) or maybe links2.

Actually, I think firefox is probably bigger problem than Openoffice.org. 
If you want to use Google Apps as your "producitivty applicationis" (or 
whateever is the current buzzword for this kind of programs) then 
probably things like links are not good enough. Is there anything from 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Gecko-based_browsers or 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#KHTML_and_WebKit-
based_browsers which would be useful for you? Just from browsing 
Wikipedia, Atlantis http://www.akcaagac.com/index_atlantis.html looks 
pretty nice. I don't know how good its Javascript/AJAX support is though.

> So there are many pieces in place, but still some lacking parts or
> missing features. In any case, I don't think that a comps group would be
> useful for 3 reasons:

Certainly not now, until dust settles a little bit on your ideas. But 
then it could be a good place to organize and coordinate the effort, and 
tool to promote and organize community developing the DE.

However, one more question came to my mind while thinking about this post 
-- "Why not XFCE"? We already have something marked as a lightweight 
environment. Why not to join their effort?

> * there is a lot of diversity,

that shouldn't be problem -- just follow your heart and be open to change 
the groups whenever you are persuaded that you made a mistake. It's 
better to have one real thing, than a mess lightweight environment is now.

> * this sets of packages are more geared toward power users,

And? Why only newbies should have a toolbox ready to use?

> * minimal usable set is very small (a display manager, a window manager)

I am not sure about it. You just have to look wider I suppose.

Best,

Matěj