On 16.08.17 04:52, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Erik Christiansen (dvalin@???):
>
> > I might just settle for the default XFCE for a while, after all: Life is
> > the art of the possible. LXQt on ascii will be worth a try when it's
> > out, though.
>
> Honestly, who the Gehenna needs a Desktop Environment? Because it
> bundles a graphical file shell? If you want one of those, install
> whichever one you like best on an a la carte basis. The whole DE
> concept lacks a compelling justification, IMO.

GUI stuff, other than a browser and Eagle doesn't get run on my
machines¹. But in my experience each distro has a DE, so it seems to be a
matter of selecting the leanest, and fastest to come up and go down.
Perhaps I'm not aware of what can be done with a paring knife.

As I have for decades worked with 4 stacked xterms most of the time, I
suppose that a graphical environment is only needed when I arc up
firefox, xpdf, libreoffice, or Eagle. But that's a couple of times per
day, so X11 seems necessary. Some sort of WM has to come with that for
managing the presentation of these apps, and then it's not far to one of
the pre-packaged desktops, I figure. It is, though, not something that I
have investigated.

Erik

¹ I'm nearly finished with the 8 drawings for my upcoming "tree change"
rural build, and rather than fight with GUI drawing packages (which
defeat my attempts to do anything with them), I have produced the 4
A3 pages in Postscript, with Vim. Postscript macros for chaining doors,
windows, stud walls, etc, made the task into a comfortable programming
exercise, and Vim folds all 816 lines into one page of top hierarchy
level. As a first foray into Postscript, it has been fun.