Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience

[Didier Kryn]

Hi Steve and Vince.     I agree with you that the desktop must stay as slim as possible, which means not installing the stuff you don't ask for. However I seem to still need more than you. Let's start a list of guis:     Xterm, Synaptic, spread-shit, presentations (eg. libre-office-impress) word processor, Lyx, Inkscape, gimp, decent mail client, full featured web browser, Xsane, scribus, openshot, vlc, ristretto, Skype, TeamSpeak, GoogleEarth. I did not list Emacs since I mostly use it inside xterm.     For what concerns tweaking: I have never seen an X11 config to work out of the box after the install, before it used udev. And if you remove network-manager, like me, either you spend some time to configure your wpa friends once for all, or you spend time with all the needed CLI apps to start and stop it everytime you need it. Sure, in 1993 there was no wifi and we lived well :-). There is also the OpenDesktop feature which creates automatically a bunch of directories you don't want. It needs some editing to suppress them. Cups does not work properly out of the box; you must give it a list of your print servers if you are roaming, but this is also true for Mac; but I suspect it's easier on Mac.     My conclusion is that, if you are looking for productivity on a Linux desktop, you still need to do yourself a few settings. There is one point on which we certainly all agree: do not install by default one million apps the user will never use and even never know they exist, which seems to be the trend of the Gnome and KDE maintaners on Debian.     Didier Le 16/02/2015 17:36, Vince Mulhollon a écrit : On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 7:44 AM, Didier Kryn <k...@in2p3.fr> wrote:     It is perfectly arguable that people involved in servers' deployment do not want to dedicate time to tweaking a Linux-based desktop. The root cause of a lot of the trouble has come from people rationalizing bad decisions, or distracting from bad decisions, as "well, the desktop needs it so we have to do (insert bad idea here)".  Combined with co-opting the desktop to mean "really awful hyper obese GUI environments for tablets" or something.  Nobody eats their own dogfood of those awful DEs so whatever the corporate is, goes, and it runs a little further off the rails every month, a little less usable, every step.  The ideal linux desktop being chromium, emacs, urxvt, and a way to switch between them has been co-opted into a weapon of mass destruction, a product tying scheme to re-implement the whole unix paradigm in a giant software development inner platform anti-pattern. There shouldn't be any "tweaking" for a desktop.  This whole bad idea comes from marketing at Microsoft where they figured they could make more license revenue by playing market segmentation games, so intentionally cripple a server kernel and call it a desktop became policy to increase revenue, because server ops can afford to pay more, typically.  There is no technical basis behind any of it, although the crippling process does have minor technical curiosity, its an organized crime extortion racket, not a technological characteristic of "desktop-full-ness" with a slider you can tweak.  I see no reason why the FOSS community has to play along with those crooks in their own game.  There is a tweaking subculture in FOSS that greatly enjoys maxing irrelevant metrics, and as long as they don't screw anything up for everyone else, they are harmless, but sometimes they really freak out about how the whole world has to change and revolve around them so their meaningless non-real world metric can increase 0.1% more than the other guy's meaningless non-real world metric.  Sometimes they find a change that is a universal good for everyone, which is cool although rare. Combine the two awful ideas, of co-opting the desktop as a weapon, and what boils down to the tyranny of the marketing droids with a side dish of the tyranny of the minority, and you have the current state of "the linux desktop", which is best avoided.  I use something totally different from "the official trademarked linux desktop" which is a desktop that happens to run linux. All you need do for us desktop users is not intentionally cripple the system by active efforts to stop us.  As long as X and xdm and xmonad and urxvt will run, I'll be fine, no worse off than I was in '93 when I fired up my first linux desktop (A SLS install off a local BBS, without X until I got a newer VGA video card, as I recall). Really what the world needs is a SDL graphics layer implementation of chromium.  Given a decent unicode console font for emacs, I'm pretty happy.  Apparently a browser called "netsurf" works pretty well in a console window.  I could do entirely without X and be pretty happy if I have a workable web browser. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

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