Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
There was some talk about an "Alternative Desktops" SIG for CentOS last year, but there wasn't enough interest or volunteers to form a group. Then we tried to narrow it down to just a "Xfce Desktop" group, but in the end that came down to "so just use EPEL". But maybe a spin is a nice focal point, then the packaging can continue in EPEL and the CentOS Xfce SIG can just offer a special ISO with the epel-release and @xfce-desktop already added to it.
Mind you, there are some of us in RHEL/CentOS/Fedora/SL worlds who stopped playing this game a while back, chucked out all the complex integrated desktop environments, run a bog-standard and simple twm or vtwm on a local X server, and call applications locally or remotely. This completely sidesteps the increasingly complex, interwoven, and thus fragile"paradigm shifts" and the needs for re-education, recompilation, and poor backwards integration of every major Gnome and KDE release.
Which reminds me that twm is actually *missing* on CentOS-7, even though it is referred to in the default xinitrc... Probably a bug ? (i.e. another missing dependency, it was a rather clean f18 rebuild) That old comforting cyan*, that said "X seems to be working, carry on"
* kids, you can have a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm
But what you are (again) suggesting, and no I haven't forgotten it, is more of an alternative window manager than an alternate desktop ? Which is great for UNIX greybeards, but not always liked by everyone. Both Xfce and MATE seem to have found their place in the ecosystem...
I can also recommend IceWM, for people wanting something more "lite".
It's vastly lighter weight, it's much faster over a remote connection, and it's been bog stable for more than 20 years now in heavy weight administration for hundreds, even thousands of hosts by people like me.
Yeah, and (for the most part) that should continue to work just fine... I don't see a contradiction, between the CLI, the GUI and the half-way. You can carry on as always, and probably don't *need* the Desktop SIG ? But it seems like "i3wm" is getting rather popular, for a Minimal SIG:
Any of http://xwinman.org/ (window managers, not desktop environments)
--anders