On Tue, 15 Aug 2017 16:45:05 +1000
Erik Christiansen <dvalin@???> wrote:

> Finding Devuan, and subscribing last night, I'm keen to replace my
> Debian 9.0 "Systemdix"¹, even at the cost of reverting to older
> packages. But I don't much like Gnome either, and have become quite
> used to LXDE - especially the boot speed of the leaner environment.
>
> So the question is as put in the subject line. The answer might also
> fit in the category "what does Devuan have to offer", perhaps.

You're in luck Eric!

You know the old saying "all email clients suck?" Well, for GOSFUIs
(the union of Window Managers and Desktop Environments
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/gosfui.htm), the saying is more
like "almost all GOSFUIs are great!". And as far as I know, it's
reasonably easy to run all GOSFUIs except Gnome in a sans-systemd
environment. And Devuan has packages for a great many of them.

For this post, please make reference to
https://l3net.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/cmp-all4.png to get a rough
idea of relative resource usages of the various GOSFUIs.

For the kind of user who likes to challenge his hot new hardware and
bring it to its knees, there's KDE. For the user who wants some
user-cuddling in a basic Win9x/Gnome2 user interface, there's Xfce,
which although it appears to be drifting to the dark side, is still
very usable without systemd. Sporting a similar user interace, but with
increased stability, parsamonious use of resources, and absolutely no
allegience to systemd is LXDE. For the past 4 years the LXDE guys have
been bragging that LXDE is deprecated and you should move to LXQt,
which isn't half bad either. I keep on with LXDE because it's better
(in my subjective opinion).

One of the great things about LXDE and LXQt is they operate with
Openbox in the background. Openbox is a very lightweight GOSFUI on its
own, with no panel (taskbar, whatever it's called). The cool thing is
you can do all the Openbox tweaks, and they show up in LXDE or LXQt.

I use Openbox without a panel, for light footprint and full screen real
estate. I installed and hotkeyed in Suckless Tools' dmenu keyboard
driven text menu for the fastest possible running of executables.

By the way, when I give presentations with my laptop my IQ goes down 30
points, so I use LXDE, once again with dmenu. Works very well. As a
matter of fact, you can gainfully use dmenu with any GOSFUI that can be
configured such that a hotkey will run an arbitrary executable, which
is almost all GOSFUIs. If you're a touch typist capable of 30 words per
minute or more, I highly recommend incorporating dmenu into your user
interface.

Openbox is a pretty lightweight GOSFUI, but some folks want lighter.
IceWM is a popular full-featured one, but it stopped being maintained a
decade ago, its menus don't really work, so dmenu is a must with IceWM.
Even lighter GOSFUIs like JWM and TWM exist. I've never been able to
get TWM to work right, but if anybody does, and incorporates almost
zero RAM dmenu, you'd have something so light you could run modern
Linux OSes on 20th century equipment.

Then there are the toughguys who use tiling GOSFUIs instead of the
traditional stacking GOSFUIs like LXDE, OpenBox, Xfce, IceWM and the
like. Tiling GOSFUIs include Ratpoison, dwm, Awesome, i9, and some
others. Most tiling GOSFUIs are considerably lighter weight than
Openbox. Tiling GOSFUIs require A LOT of experience, practice and skill
on their almost exclusively keyboard interfaces, but when you see
somebody really good at their tiling GOSFUI, their quickness and
productivity will amaze you.

As if all the preceding isn't enough, there are GOSFUIs I've heard
excellent things about but haven't seen in action: Cinnamon, Mate (I've
heard a Gnome2 clone), Trinity (slimmed down KDE), E17, and Sawfish.
And two GOSFUIs I know to be good, even though my attempts to configure
them to my desires have failed: FVWM and WindowMaker.

Most of these are available as Devuan packages, the rest are easily
compileable from upstream source. You're going to have a good time with
Devuan!

SteveT