On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 7:44 AM, Didier Kryn <kryn@???> 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.