[xstreamos-discuss] xfce desktop?

[Peter Tribble]

Just a couple of comments:

4. XFCE:
>
[...]

>
> According to distrowatch (I think), about twice as many people use
> XFCE as LXDE, if I read the numbers correctly. It's the choice for
> Linux Mint XFCE, Xubuntu, Tribblix... basically the only common
> denominator. GNOME 2 is dead, MATE is a Mint fork that exists only
> within that distribution, GNOME 3 is huge and unwieldy, Cinnamon is
> again Mint-specific, Enlightenment is an interesting concept but not
> fully implemented. That leaves XFCE, KDE and LXDE; KDE I have not seen
> anywhere in the Illumos world, leaving XFCE and LXDE. pcmanfm runs
> just fine, and I prefer it over Thunar (faster, and has tabs, which
> Thunar doesn't). There are various XFCE components that installed
> themselves when I added that package, and can be found in the LXDE
> menus, but not in any uniform fashion. Given that Tribblix has XFCE
> running just fine, I don't see any showstopper. So I think if you
> support that, you have a better chance of people feeling comfortable
> trying it out coming from Linux (either Mint XFCE or Xubuntu).
>

Xfce should build and work right out of the box. I've been
using it for years, and have made sure that it works fine
on Solaris (I use it daily on Solaris 10) and the OpenSolaris
derivatives. And the Xfce folks take portability seriously - I've
never had problems getting fixes integrated upstream. We
did a fair amount of work a while back to get things like the
process monitor and panel plugins ported as well.

There are alternatives. I've had some success with enlightenment
E17 (although E18 seems to have added a lot of change that I
haven't had time to look at properly). Apparently KDE does build
and run on Tribblix, although I've never seen it myself. (The
biggest problem I've always had with building KDE is the sheer
number of components and dependencies, rather than any
intrinsic difficulty.) And there isn't really anything wrong with older
desktop environments, to be honest.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
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