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POLL: Alternate lightweight desktop environment

Development
#1

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?

#2

Welcome!

TL;DR - What desktop environment would YOU like Whonix to ship with?

Xfce4. I’m using it full time in Whonix, alongside KDE.

For a broader response, may be start a poll thread in Whonix Support. Patrick?

#3

Sure. Whatever you find appropriate. I also think a blog post could get more attention.

Either you can register in whonix.org/blog, or suggest a blog message here and I post it, or I can write something. Whatever you prefer.

I already talked to paradox on IRC and welcomed the idea.

#4

No need for a poll: The answer is obvious. Xfce.

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.

#5

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 (https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Desktop#RAM_Adjusted_Desktop_Starter). (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.

#6

lol @ pat “wut paradox”: The guy!

#7

My fault not looking carefully at nicknames.

Yes.

#8

One thing to remember is that Jessie will probably run on Xfce4.

#10

Winners never quit!

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