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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