Re: [gentoo-user] Has semantic-desktop really become compulsatory for kmail?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday 17 February 2010 01:21:22 Mick wrote:
> However, the point has been well made by many.  KDE4 is not KDE3.x and
> with  KDE4 you get the full enchilada because that's what the developers
> have produced.  Since I do not have the ability (or time) to fork KDE4
> into my own flavour I will very much have to make do and be grateful with
> what developers care to offer.  As I progressively upgrade my hardware all
> this aforementioned 'bloat' will no doubt be less of a concern, but as
> things are maturing in the Linux land my old laptop has been getting
> slower and slower over the years when running X.  I can blame this on
> Xorg, but the applications themselves are getting <aheam> heavier somewhat
> too.
>
> I wonder if there is enough of a user requirement here for some of us to
> knock  up a few wiki pages of how to build a slimmer gentoo, choices of
> lightweight WMs, desktop apps of choice, etc.

The "gentoo wiki" (I can never remember the URL - it's the user maintained 
one) already has a great many such pages. In particular lxde and xfce4 fly on 
older hardware and is well received by and large by people wanting lean and 
mean desktops. The various *box WMs also had decent writeups on getting them 
running last time I looked.

A few eyeballs on those pages and updating them if necessary would not go 
amiss. Many people would like to have slimmer alternatives to the usual 
monstrous culprits: firefox, thunderbird, openoffice, evolution.

KDE4 does not suit everyone (neither are Ferraris and Toyotas), so while it is 
important to understand what KDE4 is and what the limits are, and not try to 
make it something other than what it is, there is definitely room for systems 
completely devoid of anything from KDE and/or Gnome.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com