Hi Ken.

Ken Dibble - 04.10.24, 14:39:59 CEST:
> What am I trying to achieve?
> I am of the opinion the less things one has, the less chance of one of
> them breaking or causing problems. I have been around long enough to
> realize that the battle against clutter is never ending even if (or
> because) I am occasionally neglectful. When I find an appropriate task
> for a machine, I try to find a solution. These solutions have
> dependencies. Sometimes later, I find a better or more appropriate
> solution. The earlier solution should be removed or else...clutter.

Above paragraph in my logic does not match:

> As to the question of why a desktop on a server. This habit/preference
> goes back decades to when AlphaServer 8000's cost a million dollars,
> were kept under lock and key, and even workstations cost tens of
> thousands. I was given access to XWindows terminals to administer them.
> Even though the gui apps were simple under CDE, I found things like
> scroll back buffers, xdiff, etc, very convenient and a major step up
> from VT220s for administration purposes, especially for things that I
> saw infrequently.

Unless… you aim for a minimal desktop *specifically* for what you wrote
about the AlphaServer – CDE has Desktop Environment in its name, but its
dependency structure has very likely been a huge lot less complex than the
dependency structure of today's desktop environments even minimal ones:

I think you can still have a minimal window manager and just the apps you
need. But if you have an full blown LXQt desktop including weather apps
like meteo-qt installed, you get a lot of dependencies… less than with
Plasma, but still a lot.

If you would just use a minimal window manager, xterm, xdiff and other
plain X11 applications, you *might* get away without libcups. I wrote
*might*. But if you go for *any* desktop environment, even more minimal
ones… I doubt it. Unless there is some kind of CDE old style minimal
desktop which has plug-able printing which I am not aware of. This is not
how modern desktop environments and distributions like Debian work
nowadays. Maybe with a source based compile it all yourself distribution
like Gentoo.

> I still find gui apps simpler for a lot of tasks, especially since I am
> old, do infrequent administration, and can't remember command line
> options for a lot of things.

Also above sentence IMHO directly contradicts your goal: "I am of the
opinion the less things one has, the less chance of one of them breaking
or causing problems."

When reading both of the sentences in sequence it just does not compute
for me, knowing what I know on how most modern distributions and desktop
environments are built.

You want "the less things" and "gui apps".

If you want minimal, you need to go minimal by only specifically install
some GUI apps that can work without libcups and leave out all the rest.
That basically excludes most web browsers as well. Firefox supports
printing, Chromium supports printing.

You might be lucky with lxqt-core or even the probably more minimal
lxde-core meta package. Or by installing the packages manually while
avoiding any "install a complete desktop environment" meta package. You
might get away with marking some packages you want to keep as being
manually installed with "apt-mark manual". If a meta package is removed
all automatically installed dependencies usually get removed. This
preference can be changed.

Anyway for me it is: I save time by either having a desktop system or a
SSH based command line system. I still remove some cruft even on desktop
systems, but nothing like libcups with for most if not all modern desktop
environments is quite at the base of the dependency chain.

You might be able to visualize the dependency chain with a tool like
debtree and building a graph image with dot. Maybe you can find a way to
avoid a dependency to libcups. But… it might take you a lot of time to
figure out what is going on in such a graph. I tried it for Firefox. It is
beyond insane nowadays. It was some 5000x5000 pixel dense graph with…
basically it looked like chaos.

If you still like to go that minimal desktop route good luck with finding a
way to make it happen in Devuan. I bet you are mostly on your own with
that.

With building minimal servers I found it easier to install minimal Devuan
and add packages than figure out a way to reduce a system with a complete
desktop environment to what I want. When installing GUI based laptops
these times I mostly go by installing the task for it and then reducing
things, but I do not aim to remove specific library packages. Cause I found
that at least with Plasma otherwise too many things I like to use in a
power user desktop don't work correctly and it takes a lot of time to
figure out the packages I need.

Of course you can also use that tool that tells you what packages keep
what packages installed to somewhat reduce the system, but aiming for
libcups2 free… well good luck. I forgot the name of the tool at the
moment. Maybe someone else knows.

Best,
--
Martin