:: Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience
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Author: Didier Kryn
Date:  
To: rowens, dng
Subject: Re: [Dng] About Devuan's audience

Le 16/02/2015 18:57, Rob Owens a écrit :
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Didier Kryn" <kryn@???>
>>       Considering Devuan is a major lifeboat of free Linux-based OS, I'm
>> anxious about its destiny and therefore trying to figure out who is
>> onboard, I mean the audience.
> For me, the line between desktop and server is very blurred.  I use Debian
> in a home environment for myself and family members.  I am responsible for
> the maintenance of 11 Debian machines.

     I am currently maintaining a dozen of embedded powerpcs, a dozen 
Dell PowerEdge servers, 3 desktops and my HP laptop, for my job, all 
running wheezy. Plus a desktop at home. But I'm not a professional 
programmer. I learned what I needed for my job. When considering 
Debian's package management, or autotools I feel like a bug 
contemplating an ophicleide. No, actually the bug does not care, but you 
see what I mean.


      I started programming in C in 1980, when Motorolla produced the 
6809 microprocessor, with a revolutionary feature: instruction address 
could be indexed  by a register. This allowed PIC, and Microware 
produced the OS9 system, with a C compiler producing PIC by default and 
a brand of Emacs. When their development model became crazy, I switched 
to Linux, in the 90's. Never touched BSD, but I guess it's familiar. I 
learned Ada 6 or 7 years ago and I loved it.


     I will retire in ~one month and I consider using part of my leisure 
building Pi-Tops for everybody around me. And I hope I can install 
Devuan on them. Never liked Gnome. It was too ugly from the begining. I 
used KDE until it started to regress. Now on xfce4, but I will give a 
try to some of the slim DE described by Steve Litt on his web pages. 
Also for the fun of their exotic look and style.


>
>
> LXDE is the desktop of choice for most, since Gnome 3 was introduced on
> Wheezy and the long-term existence of Gnome Classic (or Gnome Fallback) is
> questionable. Myself, I use Fluxbox. Some of my machines are CLI only.
>
> Security is a top priority. I also appreciate the large number of
> packages that Debian provides. I followed the systemd debates carefully
> on debian-user and debian-devel. I now am of the opinion that a large
> number of Debian developers are not paranoid enough to be my OS provider.
>
> High-value software to me, in no particular order, includes:
>
> Libreoffice
> Firefox
> LXDE [2]
> Fluxbox
> Openbox
> Ardour
> Jack
> easytag
> flac
> pcmanfm
> xterm
> xcalc
> VLC
> mplayer
> MythTV (from deb-multimedia.org)
> Handbrake (from deb-multimedia.org)
> ssh
> nfs
> ldap
> iptables
> music player [1]
>
> 1: I like Rhythmbox, but the interface is getting worse and the
> transcode feature seems finicky. I have been mostly using Guayadeque
> recently. I have need for both a basic player, and for something to
> transcode flac files to ogg vorbis or mp3 when music is copied to a
> portable player or usb stick. On Jessie without systemd, it can no
> longer detect removable media, so its days on my system may be numbered.
> See my so-far unanswered bug report:
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=774871
>
> 2: Personally, I don't care if Devuan includes Gnome or not. I think
> Gnome is so committed to 1) not being optimized for desktops and 2)
> using systemd, that it would be fair to simply write it off as unusable
> in Devuan. As long as I have alternatives, I am fine with that. Their
> vision for their product does not impress me. I think the only reason
> they have survived the past several years is because they have been
> the default on so many distros for so long. But today I think there
> are better choices for default desktop. LXDE and XFCE seem good. But
> I honestly think most people would be well-served with something basic
> like Fluxbox or Openbox with a customized startup script which runs
> wicd, and maybe adding something like fbpanel.
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