Hi Stephen,
Though I am only an end user and a (very) long time lurker in the lists
here... I think you might be missing the forest for the trees a bit
here. Currently if you look at how the various Desktop environments are
maintained in Debian you will likely find that each group is generally
developing their own answer to a default 'Desktop' or 'Home' user
experience. In the past many efforts to rationalize or consolidate that
experience have come and gone with marginal to negligible success. I'd
argue the most success we had with this was right before freedesktop.org
was started due to the early arguments around this problem. Over the
years the community has built a 'middle path' solution to this by one
one hand applying freedesktop.org and debian desktop integration
requirements to the packages in each desktop environment to assure a
base level of compatibility between them. While on the other hand allow
each of the desktop teams to pursue their own ideas of what works best
for their user experience beyond that. The current distribution of each
environment as their own installation images has proven remarkably
effective for allowing these teams to develop and grow both in
sophistication and number. When this whole conversation started we
basically had two usable desktops everyone liked, kde or gnome (and I
made the joke about tkdesk. :-) ) Since then we have seen the number of
competing options grow and have seen significant improvement in all of
the environments over that time. It was incredibly rough at first, but
bookworm does a fantastic job of managing that today.
All that said, I don't think that arguing over a lowest common
denominator 'desktop' or 'home' will not benefit us and will only create
conflict where it is ultimately unnecessary. I think our energy is
better spent on addressing consistency or basic feature parity between
them.
Case in point recently GNOME chucked the gtksu wrapper for some probably
sensible security reason, yet KDE kept their equivalent. Sadly for me
XFCE depends on the GNOME one so they lack it now as well. Ideally I as
the user should have the decision to use it or not in either XFCE or
GNOME, but alas no. If I want to do that I have to setup KDE and switch
to it. That's a significant cost for a fairly minor feature. That's the
kinda thing I think we should try to discuss and resolve. We can't make
GNOME obey all our demands but we can certainly plan more effective
feature transitions that that. (Side eye at the GNOME team...)
In the long run we have to decide if wrangling multiple herds of cats is
worth the effort. If history is any indication, then probably not.
Cheers!
Matthew (ancient lurker) McGuire
On 9/16/2023 4:05 AM, Stefan Kropp wrote:
Hello all,
I would like to work / help on the "Debian Desktop" project. I
made some notes on the wiki [1].
There were some discussion in the past. E.g. we do have a "xfce
task". I think a "Debian Desktop" should be more than "just" an
Windows Manager / Desktop Manager. A dedicate task / team to
provide a Window Manager / Desktop Manager is a very important
part. But based on this work, I think we need to add some more
applications and configuration to provide a user friendly system.
Where I think Blends come in.
There was also a discussion on IRC, GNOME may the "standard" of
Debian. I think there is no problem by providing different
desktop environments. I dedicated to use xfce, because I think
it's a nice and "small" Desktop Manager. I think it also nice for
people coming from other operating system.
What I did,...
I create a project called "marlin". [2] This project has a
"desktop"-task. This task provides the desktop manager (xfce) and
a set of application which I think would be very helpful (like
calculator, clock, office suite, pdf reader,... and also system
tools).
Maybe we can provide some "extra"-tasks to let the user install
more useful packages based on the need. E.g. the user likes to
work with internet, multimedia, graphic applications, there will
be the possibility to install it.
The marlin-desktop could be used to build a live system and be
able to let the user select it via installation (netinstall). The
"extra" packages can be installed later, if it's the users wish.
What I would like to do,...
I would like to continue with this project. I'm not happy with
the name "merlin", maybe somebody has a better idea. :)
Would be nice if somebody can look into [2] an can check if this
will technically work and there are not "concept"-issues. If it's
looks good, I think I can go head (e.g. add more applications and
system tools).
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/Discussion
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/StefanKropp/marlin
