As a long time user of Whonix and an advocate for free-speech and privacy I have decided it was time that I gave back to the community. For the foreseeable future I will have quite a lot of free time and have decided that I will spend this new-found free time by helping with the development of Whonix.
For my first major contribution I would like to work on getting a package up and running which uses a lightweight desktop environment (as opposed to KDE). However, before I start working on this, I would like to get somewhat of a consensus from the community of what they want.
Putting aside all technical aspects, I am interested in what DE people would want purely from a useability and point of view and from there I will do whatever necessary to make it happen.
TL;DR - What desktop environment would YOU like Whonix to ship with?
The question is how to best implement it. It doesn’t need to be a separate flavor/build of whonix because Patrick has already begun work (have you talked about it yet?) on making a custom desktop switcher on boot that lets you chose between Console/Xfce/KDE.
Paradox could be in charge of add/test/maintain the xfce related stuff in the whonix repo. Or however it is that Patrick does these things.
When XFCE only adds a few MB, we could install it by default, have a combined terminal/KDE/XFCE build and add a menu to RADS (Platform-specific Desktop Tips). (Using dialog, a menu similar to whonixsetup / whonix_repository.)
One could choose at boot, it remember your last choice, it could have a timeout, I think. Due to technical limitations of dialog I don’t know how to circumvent, it would not have a visible timeout counter.
We CAN do this. It’s an option. Not a decision, of course.
However, it’s very easy to make it modular. Someone else could create a Whonix build that is terminal-only, XFCE-only, KDE-only and so forth. No limitations here.
What paradox? We can add an unlimited amount of new packages to Whonix’s repository.