Is it in Debian? If not, how is it supposed to get updated? Doing the initial packaging and then keeping up with upstream? Perhaps I am over thinking it here.
That said, if you, Patrick, troubadour, whoever involved here, could afford the time to briefly test (maybe an hour or so) the Crunchbang Waldorf distribution from a desktop experience perspective and tell me how you feel this in contrast to Debian "lxde", that'd be really great.Doesn't matter if I like it or not. I keep maintaining the KDE desktop. If you contribute and maintain something that you like, by all means, I am happy to include it into Whonix. Others might like it as well. I don't think it would be useful if I told you "I like KDE over LXDE over Openbox", "preferred LXDE over Openbox". (Which means, I always found Openbox most inconvenient - but this is again very subjective, perhaps I have just not clue about it.)
Speaking of fiddling a lightweight desktop together, may you please tell me how exactly whonixcheck + timesync + whonixsetup get autostarted, what's needed here, etc.? I mean, if you run a tty (without X), it runs upon autologin in CLI. If you start a desktop (e.g. KDE) it comes up with notifications and stuff. I would be interested how this all works together internally (also /etc/whonix.d/ ?) in order to come up with potential solutions of integrations into "lxde", "whonix-light", whatever. Hope that makes sense. Thanks!Makes sense.
The great thing is, porting Whonix to Gnome would be trivial (in comparison, not in total), because Gnome supports as well as KDE, Unity(Screenshots of Common Whonix Activities), Xfce(Screenshots of Common Whonix Activities), Lxde(Screenshots of Common Whonix Activities) the xdg desktop standard. Other desktops might support it as well. No idea about Openbox.
[In Whonix source code folder in whonix_(shared/gateway/workstation)…]
Autostart by xdg standard: /etc/xdg/autostart (includes hook to start start msgdispatcher --x)
Start menu items by xdg standard: /usr/share/applications/whonix/
desktop icons (By xdg standard? Seems to be quite portable as well.): /usr/share/whonix/postinst.d/70_desktopicons
daemon autostart (sdwdate, whonixcheckd… independent form desktop environment as well): /etc/init.d/
msgdispatcher --cli gets started by the whonix_shared/etc/profile.d/40_msgdispatcher.sh hook. Independent from desktop environment. Depends on tty1 autologin.
sdwdate is a pure command line tool, which can run as daemon as well (default in Whonix). Daemon gets started by /etc/init.d hook.
timesync is a plugin for sdwdate (implemented in /etc/sdwdate.d). timesync supports gui + cli. timesync monitors sdwdate (checks bootclockrandomization and does timesanitycheck). timesync uses msgcollector to issue messages. msgdispatcher dispatches them.
So if your desktop environment support xdg, then there is nothing to do. Otherwise it’s up to you to re-implement /etc/xdg/autostart using the desktops native autostart capabilities and/or up to you to re-implement the start menu entries and eventually the desktop icons.
I hope I have nothing forgotten here and can elaborate when there are open questions.