On 02/20/2015 09:30 AM, Nate Bargmann wrote:
> * On 2015 20 Feb 05:55 -0600, Aldemir Akpinar wrote:
>> I would say +1 for everything that is written with this e-mail and above.
>> However, there's one thing here,
>> there are more people running servers than people running linux on their
>> desktops, so IMHO devuan should first focus on the servers.
>
> Focus is fine, but I trust the team when they state Xfce will be the
> default DE that they are taking a very pragmatic approach. For one, I
> believe there are many more Linux desktop users than we ever know.
> Informally, I know of many hobbyists who use Linux as their desktop.
> They do not appear on sales numbers anywhere as they are likely
> converting a Windows PC to run their Linux desktop. To intentionally
> lock these users out would be a grave disservice, IMHO. Hopefully, the
> systemd regressions introduced into Xfce will be easy for the team to
> revert (actually, I wonder whether the problem is in Xfce upstream or
> the way the Debian maintainers built their packages so that without
> systemd running as PID 1 the Xcfe power manager becomes a lame duck as
> does LightDM).
>
> Dropping Gnome will not be a loss nor will dropping KDE (or whatever
> they are calling it these days) from Devuan as these projects pretty
> much have a philosophy opposite of that expressed by the Unix
> philosophy. IMO, Xfce is more of a loose confederation of programs that
> work well together as a "desktop", than an integrated whole. For
> example, Thunar and Xfce Terminal run just fine as stand-alone apps
> inside a bare OpenBox session, at least on Wheezy.
>
> As a home user of Debian running Xfce and also with a strong hobbyist
> interest and advocate for Linux systems, I do not wish to be excluded by
> Devuan and, at least for 1.0, that does not appear to be in the plan.
>
> - Nate
>
FreeBSD supports XFCE Via its package manager (pkg) or /usr/ports, so it
must be possible to run XFCE w/o the systemd daemon(s) or shared objects.

Also, I configured server farms for decades (retired now) and a simple
GUI was convenient. People, even highly technical one, are pictorially
oriented; as a species we relate to images. In that context we ran the
CDE (common desktop environment) and its derivatives at Bell Labs (AT&T)
using Sun SPARC and HP RISC servers.