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

[Patrice Dumas]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 10:08:59AM +0100, Matej Cepl wrote:
> 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?

Yes they use pam. They just need to pass the right pam environment
variables to pam_ck_connector, but lately I have seen the following in
the consolekit changelog:
        * Add new helper for getting tty from DISPLAY (William Jon McCann)
so I was hoping everything could be automatic, I asked for an
explanation on the hal list, and directly to David, so far no answer.

> > 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).

What else? 

> > (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.

See my answer to Rahul for why I find it bad.

> > 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?). 

I know.

> 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.

I don't think that it is a real replacement. Since it is server-side you
have to have internet, trust the server... But indeed it can be of help.

> > 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 

Indeed. It may be for browsing with simple javascript (there is
currently no css suppport).

> 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.

Indeed, looks cool. Seems that WebCore has javascript support.

> > 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.

I don't think that dust will settle. The desktop is a moving target,
with kde/gnome/xfce ruling freedesktop and having resources put by 
vendors in these efforts (redhat is a good example of a company pushing 
the desktop innovations which also means breaking existing apps). So 
things change a lot (fonts, handling, hal/ConsoleKit, utf8), while there 
is no resources (that is paid developpers) put for light DE. I also 
think that light DE developers may be reluctant to add new features 
(only a guess, though). As a result light DE will always be catching up, 
with doing things as root needed, ugly workaround for things to work.
To put things clearly before somebody misinterpret my words, I am not
complaining about those breakages. But they happen a lot and big desktop
developpers don't care about compatibility with existing stuff or
helping light DE to have backward compatibility -- still not a
complaint, but a remark.

> 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?

I help with xfce packaging when I can (I reviewed thunar, for example,
and see ristretto review). And xfce related applications are light, in
general (thunar, for example is a lightweight file manager). I used xfce
in the past (fedora 3, maybe 4?) but then it became to take time to
launch, and then I switched to fluxbox.
 
> > * 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.

Right.

> > * this sets of packages are more geared toward power users,
> 
> And? Why only newbies should have a toolbox ready to use?

Power usres knwo what to install and have precise choices, so a group
won't be of much use for them. It would be interesting for newbies who
want something light. But also a trap for them, they'll have to mount
manually their usb sticks as root by looking at the bottom of dmesg...

> > * 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.

Nothing more is necessary for lightweight DE. Of course there are lots
of apps that can be optional but are suited for lightweight DE
(dockapps, gmrun, xdvi, xfig, conky, gv and many others...).

--
Pat