On 03/02/2015 01:01 AM, Dima Krasner wrote:
> I wonder - is it possible to mix 4.12 components with 4.10 ones?
>
> If yes, we could backport only user-visible parts (xfwm4, Thunar, xfce4-panel, etc') to keep maintenance costs down.

My first response to that is probably "Sorry, but no." While the two
share commonalities, they also probably have differing interlinking code
between desktop components. If you swap one, you would be wise to
simply do change them all out.

I'm not trying to make a presumption to say this, but I think that a
desktop Devuan should, when dealing with workstations, standardize on XFCE.

What people on the desktop really want is a polished working Linux that
does what they need. Tailor every app on the distribution toward that
end, even if that means tossing out a few programs with duplicate
functionality or redoing a GUI. XFCE is by far the most lightweight of
the major desktop offerings. It's certainly far more stable, and less
crash prone than Plasma, and is not a totally dysfunctional, simplified,
systemd-ified, CPU sucking pig like Gnome.

It wouldn't mean that you have to toss out the best of the Qt/KDE
apps,. Just set the style to GTK+ by default, and they integrate with
XFCE very nicely. That way you can completely avoid Plasma
altogether. As for Gnome apps, to be perfectly blunt, I have yet to
see a number of Gnome 3 apps that I cannot live without. Virtually every
decent Gnome app worth having still uses GTK2, with very few exceptions.

I use a few things like virt-manager for the sake of convenience, but
that could be overcome.