[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting of Monday 19 September 2016

[Rick Moen]

Quoting GoOSSBears (acohen36 at linuxwaves.com):

> As we were discussing antiX, the subject came up about systemd's
> integration (some say "takeover") of most of the Linux distros' init
> systems and dependencies.  This immediately hearkened back to Bobbie
> S's and Rick M's relevant comments here over four months ago here
> about Devuan and other systemd-free efforts.

FWIW, I subsequently did a test conversion of the default Debian 8
'Jessie' over to one of the several other packgaed inits (OpenRC), 
using a VM, and found it dead-easy to do so.  I wrote up a bunch of tips
about that, here:

'OpenRC Conversion' on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian/  (or diret link
http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian/openrc-conversion.html) 

DE complications and what to do about them are noted.  Short version:
Rumours of Debian 8's enslavement to Clan Poettering are much exaggerated.
SysVInit and others also work fine, not just OpenRC.

The Devuan people semi-appreciate my efforts but not entirely, because,
as usual, I'm deemed insufficiently devoted to the cause, politically
unreliable, etc.  (It was rather like the gratifyingly bracing
experience of being considered a conservative in Berkeley, mostly
because of driving a car.  Gotta love Berkeley and Madison, about the
only places in the USA I'm considered right-wing.)

Anway, it's actually pretty impressive that antiX 16-sid manages XFCE
and KDE4 with not only no systemd but also no libsystemd0 and no udev.
Go, them!

> 4. Finally and IIRC, Bobbie S enthusiastically mentioned her
> preference(s) for the K DE and its Dolphin, KOffice, and other
> K-applets. I mentioned my preferences for using either lightweight
> DE's such as XFCE or else often using WM's (in antiX and other
> distros) together with piecemeal applications as I feel the need.

I think one of these days you ought to try Moksha Desktop (a variant of
the Enlightenment DE) as packaged by Bodhi Linux.  I'd be curious what
you think about it.

http://www.bodhilinux.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhi_Linux
(Bodhi Linux installs apps sparsely by default, but you can add lots of
apps trivially via the provided Web front-end to the package manager.)

In the long term, I have high hopes for the LXQt DE
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXQt), but things are a bit unsettled
with it yet, i.e., it's too new, unpolished, and everything has lots of
debugging code in it.

One of the reasons:  The writing's been on the wall for quite a long
time that gtk is a bad choice of toolkit for DEs, in part on account of
just fundamental suckage, partly because there's too much rewriting
necessary every time there's a major gtk release, and partly because
increasingly gtk is suffering a case of GNOME-only orientation.  So,
many DEs have been moving away from it to Qt.  The LXDE people announced
that move in 2013, joined forces with the faltering Razor-Qt DE, and the
result is LXQt.  

I'll be curious to see how viable XFCE remains in that regard (it being
the 'other', non-GNOME DE using gtk).