Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
Since the Alternative Desktop SIG didn't happen, we thought we would make a more focused effort and improve the Xfce desktop environment experience on CentOS. That might end up being a dedicated CentOS SIG, or just a couple of improvements to the existing packages from EPEL.
Once upon a time, or more precisely: back in the CentOS 5.0 days, Xfce 4.4 was available in Extras and it was a pretty simple install that just worked "out of the box". Now, there's the newer versions available via EPEL - but the experience is nowhere near painless...
I still bundle vtwm build tools over at https://github.com/nkadel/vtwm-5.5.x-srpm for RHEL based systems. It's much lighter even than XFCE, and stable as granite, and has a *much, much smaller* dependency tree than most modern desktop environments.
I think we touched upon this briefly last time, there is nothing wrong with running with "just" a window manager - but some people still want a full desktop (especially if coming from some other operating system). And besides GNOME and KDE, I think that Xfce is a great alternative...
I had something based on IceWM, but it was mostly for older machines. It had a reasonably functioning desktop, with the Xfe file manager. A more recent alternative is LXDE, which I don't like much myself - but LXQt looks promising - once gtk2 finally goes out of fashion...
The version available in Fedora 21 is much too unstable yet, though. And using Qt5 (soon: only), means it is not really suitable for CentOS ?
So maybe for CentOS 8 there will be more alternatives (than Xfce 4.12), but for CentOS 5-7 there's not too many good alternative desktops around.
Much of the pain these days is unweaving all the Gnome-ification from the xinitrc and similar tools.
Common enemies :-)
The tight coupling between GNOME 3 and GTK+ 3 is rather troubling... It will probably end up being a big problem, but only after Xfce 4.12:
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.12/roadmap/gtk3
As mentioned above, some find it easier to port from GTK+ (2) to Qt, rather than using GTK3. And besides, there's GNOME3 for it already ?
Probably not an issue until RHEL 9, or something.
Note that in recent Fedora product split, anything not using GNOME 3 (a.k.a. Workstation) will by definition be using the Server variant:
https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/12/10/fedora-21-greatest-hits-non-server-... https://fedoraserver-wgblog.rhcloud.com/graphical-desktop-environments-on-fe...
Our own main use case is as a Linux Terminal Server.
A personal use case is running in a Virtual Machine.
--anders