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 <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.
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