On 2012-02-23 05:54:49 -0800 (-0800), Russ Allbery wrote:
> I probably missed some key thing that makes this work, but the
> last time I tried, using startx when you want to launch a desktop
> environment like GNOME or Xfce was quite painful and confusing.
[...]
Ahh, yes... I don't try. I'm just using ratpoison with no window
decorations or anything (or no WM at all in some cases, such as on
kiosk setups which spawn an xinit wrapper straight out of the
inittab which restarts automatically when the application is
closed). I'm not meaning to insult the maintainers and upstreams of
the popular *nix DEs, who do a remarkable job with an insanely
complex collection of features... rather I tend to agree with them
that if you want to tune your X in any fundamental way (even just to
pass a command-line option to the xserver as in Ian's original
complaint) then you probably aren't the intended audience for the
default package selection.
Maybe I unjustly characterize graphical desktop environments as
buggy and inflexible, but it seems to me that the login managers
themselves are no different from the rest of the prepackaged desktop
environments in that regard. I've always assumed "Desktop" in
tasksel (like anything in tasksel, really) was intended for people
who wanted something like Mac/Windows and couldn't be bothered to
figure out what specific packages they needed for their systems. I,
on the other hand, am OCD enough to want something approximating the
Unix workstations I grew up using which gave direct and deliberate
control over every aspect of presentation and interface--but that's
not to say that I want to go back to pre-CDE/Motif X technologies by
any means (I'm glaring at you, OPEN LOOK).
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