[CentOS-devel] KDE light?

[Niki Kovacs]

Hi,

Allow me to shortly introduce myself, since I'm new to this list. I'm an 
Austrian sysadmin living in Montpezat (South France). I'm in charge of 
computers (servers and desktops) in eleven small communities that 
migrate from Windows to Linux. Institutions like public libraries and 
town halls get networked, and every Windows installation is replaced by 
a GNU/Linux system. I had tested various (a dozen or so) distributions, 
and we finally settled with CentOS (both server and desktop), which we 
like very much. The current desktop we use is the default GNOME, and 
XFCE on older hardware.

 From time to time, I fiddle with the KDE desktop, and my impression is 
always the same: 1) it's great! 2) it's cluttered! KDE has a series of 
really great apps (Konqueror file manager, K3B, KMail, ...), but the 
problem is: it's not very modular. More often than not, one has to 
install a whole bunch of useless - and often redundant - apps in order 
to just have one little app. For example, in order to have the music 
player JuK, I would have to install kdemultimedia-extras, which gives me 
a whole lot of other players I will never use.

I know I'm not the first to complain about this state of things, and 
various distributions have already taken steps to find a solution. 
Debian has broken up KDE packages, so you can install just the packages 
you want. Arch Linux has the kdemod project, which is great also. Gentoo 
does something similar, IIRC. And there's a german Slackware-based 
distribution called Pocket Linux which does just that: take the 
cholesterol out of KDE.

So I just thought I would drop a note on the -devel list: to suggest a 
"KDE Light" project for CentOS. Ideally, I would have a minimal system 
and X11, and a simple 'yum groupinstall 'KDE Light'' would give me a 
minimal KDE desktop.

I'm curious to have your opinions about this.

Cheers,

Niki Kovacs