Agreed, Martijn. I know others doing like you. This makes full sense.

     But there are also people, like me, who are fans of DIY, and have 
fun assembling things to obtain a nice working Linux desktop (I also 
install and manage servers). It takes some time, but it is (was?) 
perfectly doable. I don't think people like me are the target of Gnome, 
but I thought we were the target of Debian.

     It must be perfectly doable to have a linux desktop without systemd 
and policykit, and also without dbus. I am sorry for the guy who gently 
proposes to maintain dbus on devuan, but I would like if its 
installation was optionnal, because I would like to see how it can work 
without it. But, for a desktop, udev, eudev, or vdev is mandatory.

     I dislike dbus because I find it too complicated and do-it-all, 
although I understand the motivation for it. Also, as far as I remember, 
it is too much C++-minded. I have been programming in C from the 
beginning of the 80's and loved it, but I think C++ is wrong by design 
(personal thought), although I have no choice but to use programs 
written in that language, as well as Perl, Python and Ruby, which I have 
no opinion about.

     Same kind of dislike towards network-manager. This is the first 
package I use to remove after installing Debian. The reason: I don't 
know really what it does and how, but it goes in the middle of my way. I 
am well off with ifplugd, wpa_supplicant and a roaming configuration of 
wlan0.

     After its decision to force systemd in, Debian should rename itself 
Debian-Gnome-Linux, and I hope Devuan will truely be Devuan-Gnu-Linux. 
There's no harm in having several OS based on the same kernel. After 
all, there's already Busybox-Linux, this is a fact; Busybox's not Gnu; 
and similar projects.

     Didier

Le 12/02/2015 06:33, Martijn Dekkers a écrit :
>
> About 5 to 6 years ago, I came to a point where I found that I was
> spending more time making things work then actually using them, and a
> while later, reluctantly, I switched my main desktop environment to
> Windows. I manage a good number of servers, with the vast majority of
> them running Linux, but desktops? Windows all the way. Gnome developed
> exactly along the path I suspected it would which is why I avoided it
> - Miguel de Icaza being an early incarnation of Lennart. (although I
> am very happy with the Midnight Commander...), and although KDE is a
> lot more agreeable to my tastes, there is simply too much tweaking and
> day to day little hassles - I have a job to do, and my PC is the tool
> I need to do this job - it needs to Just Work(tm)
>
> Whilst I am still utterly amazed with how awesome Linux servers are, I
> don't think we will ever get there with desktops.
>