[CentOS-devel] Xfce for CentOS group

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-non-live-installs-fedup-product-behaviour/
https://fedoraserver-wgblog.rhcloud.com/graphical-desktop-environments-on-fedora-21-server/

Our own main use case is as a Linux Terminal Server.

A personal use case is running in a Virtual Machine.

--anders