Martin Steigerwald:
> 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:

Yes, life was a log simpler then...

CDE is motif window manager (mwm) + some buttons etc. down mid to start
a few programs with and a set of standard (for CDE) programs.

At that time there were no cups and you could choose between bsd or
sysV style printing, and yes, printers were either PostScript or thoose
where one byte to printer mostly meant one character printed.

> 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.

You can use fvwn 1 or 2, mwm or similar window managers. Acutally, CDE
doesn't provide much, you can just as wall access the programs through
a xterm or a root menu.

> 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.

You can do that in Gentoo, just use gutenprint in gimp and
firefox prints only to files.

For inkjets you have some pain, but that is partly because foomatic
people don't want people to know how to do it. It is similar how udev
hides pci-id,usb-id to driver maps from users resulting in you have to
"use our software else you cannot use this and that hw".

...
> but aiming for libcups2 free… well good luck.
...

Perfectly possible, but I don't exspect debian to deliver that.

Regards,
/Karl Hammar