On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 10:42 PM, Bill Kontos vkontogpls@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 12:22 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net

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wrote:

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please do distribute to interested parties / lists, TDE (aka KDE 3.5) is strategically quite important as it's one of the remaining comprehensive desktop environments that is also light-weight and relevant.

l.

I don't understand the point of this DE at all. DEs like Mate and Cinnamon have the exact same goal of offering a traditional and familiar desktop but with newer backends. Is there any specific reasons as to why this is better ?

they're not based on gnome (which in turn is based on GTK). that alone is good enough reason. the TDE maintainers have become the de-facto maintainers of qt3. qt3 is the only version of qt which is not bloated beyond sanity. if it wasn't for TDE, qt3 would have long ago become abandonware.

there are many other reasons but these are the ones that i can immediately think of.

l.

On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 10:55 PM, Christopher Havel laserhawk64@gmail.com wrote:

Luke, dare I ask your opinion on XFCE, which is my preferred DE...? (MATE is my second choice, followed by... oddly enough, that new Budgie thing.)

phil introduced xfce to me a long time ago, i quite like its simplicity and the fact that they leverage the lower-level services of gnome but in a non-over-burdensome way. it's what i'll be putting onto the eoma68-a20 cards by default.

l.

Yaaaaaaaay I didn't get excoriated for my choice. I love how configurable it is. Then again, I am an artist... we're persnickety :P

Luke: your thoughts, if any, on that new Budgie desktop environment? I tried it, it's not very configurable (yet?) and it doesn't work with the USB touchpad mouse on my homemade laptop (well, OK, it does on the lock screen but not once you're logged in, weird), but it's sort of attractive and I *almost* like the simplicity of it. (It's a *little* too simple for me, right now.) They've even got an official Ubuntu flavor, now -- I realize that's not exactly a glowing recommendation in these parts; I'm mentioning it entirely because of what it means in terms of popularity amongst the general userbase. Budgie might be one to "stick a pin in" as one of the talking heads on my TV would say... I think it's a potential rising star.

On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 6:36 PM, Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:

On Tue, Jun 06, 2017 at 11:33:04PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

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On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 10:55 PM, Christopher Havel laserhawk64@gmail.com wrote:

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Luke, dare I ask your opinion on XFCE, which is my preferred DE...?

(MATE

...

...

is my second choice, followed by... oddly enough, that new Budgie

thing.)

...

phil introduced xfce to me a long time ago, i quite like its simplicity and the fact that they leverage the lower-level services of gnome but in a non-over-burdensome way. it's what i'll be putting onto the eoma68-a20 cards by default.

I'm using xfce as my main desktop. It works.

-- hendrik

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Forgive the one-time topposting, please; I'm on a phone for the moment and phone Gmail, being different from webclient Gmail, is not friendly to my customary post style.

*ahem*

I'm really not familiar with what Qt and GDK actually are, TBH. I believe my understanding is correct that they are some sort of building-block type systems (scripting languages, if I had to guess), such that WMs and DEs can be made from Qt or GDK "parts"... but that's as far as I go.

On Jun 6, 2017 7:00 PM, "Luke Yelavich" themuso@themuso.com wrote:

On Wed, Jun 07, 2017 at 08:39:49AM AEST, Christopher Havel wrote:

...

Luke: your thoughts, if any, on that new Budgie desktop environment? I tried it, it's not very configurable (yet?) and it doesn't work with the USB touchpad mouse on my homemade laptop (well, OK, it does on the lock screen but not once you're logged in, weird), but it's sort of attractive and I *almost* like the simplicity of it. (It's a *little* too simple for me, right now.) They've even got an official Ubuntu flavor, now -- I realize that's not exactly a glowing recommendation in these parts; I'm mentioning it entirely because of what it means in terms of popularity amongst the general userbase. Budgie might be one to "stick a pin in" as one of the talking heads on my TV would say... I think it's a potential rising star.

I read recently that there are plans to move to using Qt5 going forward too, so make of that what you will.

Luke

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On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 1:39 AM, Christopher Havel laserhawk64@gmail.com wrote:

Luke: your thoughts, if any, on that new Budgie desktop environment? I tried it, it's not very configurable (yet?) and it doesn't work with the USB touchpad mouse on my homemade laptop (well, OK, it does on the lock screen but not once you're logged in, weird), but it's sort of attractive and I *almost* like the simplicity of it. (It's a *little* too simple for me, right now.) They've even got an official Ubuntu flavor, now -- I realize that's not exactly a glowing recommendation in these parts; I'm mentioning it entirely because of what it means in terms of popularity amongst the general userbase. Budgie might be one to "stick a pin in" as one of the talking heads on my TV would say... I think it's a potential rising star.

I love the fact that they have an Ubuntu version. The DE is completely

distro-agnostic unlike things like Cinnamon for example.

On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 11:17 PM, Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:

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there are many other reasons but these are the ones that i can immediately think of.

Just wondering ... are they infested with systemd?

no.

dbus?

KDE has its own RPC mechanism called DCOP, which, famously, was hacked together in about 20 minutes. KDE 3 predates d-bus by quite some years so it was never integrated in.

pulseaudio?

again, KDE3 predates pulseaudio so it never had pulseaudio as a critical dependency.

basically for all the insidious fuck-ups that have been made (and by a funny coincidence *entirely* funded primarily by redhat), KDE3 side-steps absolutely all of them.

it is also not insignificant that KDE3 is primarily a *European* endeavour.

l.

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 10:27:47PM -0400, David Niklas wrote:

On Tue, 6 Jun 2017 22:50:20 +0100 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:

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On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 10:42 PM, Bill Kontos vkontogpls@gmail.com wrote:

...

On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 12:22 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net

...

wrote:

<snip> > > Is there any specific reasons as to why this is better ? > > They're not based on gnome (which in turn is based on GTK). that > alone is good enough reason.

And GTK is bad because? If I were to write a graphical app in C wouldn't I *have* to use GTK?

No. GTK is the Gimp toolkit, originally written for the GNU image manipulation program.

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)

There's no reason other systems shouldn't be built directly on the X toolkit.

Qt, is presumably another such system.

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.

-- hendrik

On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 4:55 AM, Neil Jansen njansen1@gmail.com wrote:

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

I use i3. Tilling wms are so good that I really don't understand why they are not used as much. Xmonad is also great, you can configure it using haswell.

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 4:44 PM, Neil Jansen njansen1@gmail.com wrote:

To lkcl's original quote "[TDE] is strategically quite important as it's one of the remaining comprehensive desktop environments that is also light-weight and relevant.", i3 and xmonad are more lightweight, and are more relevant to the sort of culture to which this mailing list is centered around.

A tilling window manager is just that, a window manager. It manages windows, resizes etc. A desktop environment is a complete set of tools including applications, applets, utilities, a window manager etc. Most of the applications we are using today with any kind of setup we run are part of some DE, with some notable exceptions like transmission. But that's beyond the point, TDE seems to be an interesting project( btw you can e.g. run i3 as the window manager in kde replacing kwin with some pretty sweet integration if you really want).

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On 14/06/17 12:39, Hendrik Boom wrote:

If I understand correctly, tiling window managers don't put windows on top of one another. On my laptop that would mean I have crazily small windows.

Depends on the WM. I've tried a few, but returned to the first tiling WM I tried, Ratpoison. Couldn't get used to the way the others would move and resize the tiles without being told to. Ratpoison, on the other hand, I've seen is arguably not a true tiler, but it starts with the whole screen taken up with one window. The screen can be then partitioned into any number of frames by straight lines across the frame being divided, with a window in each frame. Any windows that don't fit in the frames are "behind", as it were, the visible windows.

Tor

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On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 09:30:51PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 10:27:47PM -0400, David Niklas wrote:

...

And GTK is bad because? If I were to write a graphical app in C wouldn't I *have* to use GTK?

No. GTK is the Gimp toolkit, originally written for the GNU image manipulation program.

And has since gone through major revisions. Its name is GTK+, BTW.

It uses (presumably) the X toolkit (I don't kow its name),

X Toolkit is Xt, not GTK+. GTK+ nowadays has several backends. On Linux it can use either X or Wayland (or also Mir, in the Ubuntu variant).

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.

And also the compositor. And keep in mind that rendering is client side nowadays.

(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)

There's no reason other systems shouldn't be built directly on the X toolkit.

I happen to use a language (Hebrew) that requires some non-trivial rendering. GTK+ and QT support this (at least the basics: display. More complex layouts and rendering of edited text have their own gotchas) for over 10 years. If you don't use them, each program has to add support independently.

This may e.g. show up in window titles, because browsers may put the title of pages there. The relatively minimalistic window manager I now use (awesome) renders them just fine. Because it uses GTK+ (or at least parts of the GTK+ stack). Another minimalistic WM I used to use (icewm) added support for the library fribidi independently and thus should properly render Hebrew and Arabic. But good luck with other complex languages.

Isn't that what will happen with X as soon as people get fanatical about wayland like they have done with systemd?

Thanks, David

Nobody is getting fanatical over wayland. Wayland solves real problems with a rather small disturbance( drivers are almost the same, only applications are affected) and it has some sort of xwayland fallback mode in case it doesn't work which worked like a charm on the case of k3b for me. gtk supports it pretty well now and qt is working on it too. It was turned on by default on the current fedora release so as you can probably guess it's a long way from ready but it's improving really fast, and at least as far as gnome apps are concerned they work relatively well( gparted being an exception).