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