On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 11:03:07AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> The route I've taken, so far, with experimental machines initting with
> sysvinit, OpenRC, Epoch and Runit, was to remove as much "desktopism"
> as possible. This isn't for everybody, but it works for me because I
> never did like the high degree of "desktopism" that Xfce delivers.

Desktops seem to aggregate a bundle of software that attempts to meet
most of the major needs of most users, of necessity implying bloat
(because it isn't tuned to what *a* user needs, it has features that
each user will find useless). But generally the desktop-specific tools
I've used seem to lack features I want.
For a while, I used bits of LXDE, and that worked. But the most useful
tools I've found are almost all independent projects:
icewm, vim, nedit, xterm/urxvt, worker, mc, mtpaint/pixmap, links2, Ted,
magicpoint...
In contrast to that I have only gnumeric.

> My experience is that, on systemd-equipped distros on which you've
> installed an alternate init, NetworkManager isn't worth the heartache
> it takes to set up. Running the Wicd daemon and using the Wicd-gtk
> client is an alternative that takes more keystrokes. Alternatively,
> some day I'm going to create an nCurses equivalent of NetworkManager,
> but not any time soon.

Some you might be interested in: wicd-curses, ceni, or my own lame
wpanet (github.com/idunham/wpanet; it's got a rudimentary dialog
interface for generating and extending wpa_supplicant.conf that should
be able to use xdialog or whiptail).
The configuration part was not the point of wpanet; it was about
starting wpa_supplicant and a dhcp client without relying on sleep,
but there is an interface that I hope is fairly clear.

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham