[CentOS-devel] Fixing up Xfce for CentOS 7

Sun Mar 15 19:03:16 UTC 2015
Anders F Björklund <afb at users.sourceforge.net>

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