On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 9:30 PM, Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
It uses (presumably) the X toolkit (I don't kow its name), which is the low-level interface to sending and receiving the network packets for the X protocol with the ICCC -- the inter-client communications conventions,
which
goern communicataions with a window manager. (I don't know how much of
this
is now obsolete i ws using X in the 80's, and I gather it at least hs
remained
more or less compatible; there's a lot less flexibility in X nowadays, as
far
as I cana tell)
The two big ones are xcb (https://xcb.freedesktop.org/) and xlib ( https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/)
There's no reason other systems shouldn't be built directly on the X
toolkit.
Many tiling window managers (http://lmgtfy.com/?t=i&q=i3-gaps) do exactly that. They build directly on top of xlib or xcb, and they're freaking awesome. I'm REALLY surprised that nobody has mentioned any of the popular tiling window managers like i3 in this thread. They're so lightweight and usable, why would you need Gnome or KDE?
And the problems with GTK is that the developers have mpved on to another
major
release that, I'm told, isn't very compatible and old code is dying. It's another of the systems that have been forked. I don't know how well
the
old release is being maintained.
Look at some of the tiling window managers: i3, bspwm, xmonad are 3 popular ones. If you hate gnome and you hate KDE, these are all worth a look.