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Comment by flevo | Hacker News Reader

Great to see they are making headway. Wonder about the long term sustainability though, as more and more software such as GNOME3 DE lists it as a dependency

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There's also Linux life without Gnome. I hope this means more people will try out alternative window managers.

This doesn't address the point raised. He mentioned that more and more software relies on systemd giving just one example.

IMO not much has changed in the last 2 years. Not too much additional software really relies on systemd. Nor that systemd integrated any other software like it did in the beginning (e.g. merging udev into it). There haven't been too many feature additions as well. What did happen is that way more software ships a systemd conf file, but that's about it.

Could always use the Window manager that is included in the X-Server source code package: TWM. It's dependencies is basically the X-server.

If you have ever used TWM, then you would know that the 'T' stands for Terrible. Fortunately, there are lots of lightweight WMs that are far better. Personally, I use tiling WMs (namely XMonad at the moment), so I could really care less what GNOME, KDE, et al are up to. However, I realize most people are accustomed to stacking WMs and expect something similar to what is provided by proprietary OSes with a similar amount of eye candy as well.

Hey now, no need to resort to name-calling. In fact, the “T” originally stood for “Tom”, but the name was later changed so the “T” stood for “Tab” (referring to its then-default look of window titles as little tabs on top of windows).

Furthermore, it is not terrible. I’ve used TWM for more than 20 years. It worked perfectly fine for me when I started to use it, and it still does so today, so I have not seen a need to switch.

Under Debian you can run GNOME under other init systems thanks to Debian+Canonical creating systemd-shim (alternative to logind). Under Devuan you cannot use GNOME (they don't offer it). This as Devuan claims that it is impossible (despite being possible within Debian) (!)

  This task package is used to install the Devuan desktop, 
  featuring the GNOME desktop environment, and with other 
  packages that Devuan users expect to have available on the 
  desktop.

https://devuan.org/os/packages/task-gnome-desktop

For as long as said shim and logind are compatible, and logind is a moving target.

Simply do not use gnome 3 and problem solved.

It's a mystery to me that people still associate linux desktop with gnome. The gnome project has a long history of not caring about users or developers and prioritizing their view and their brand.

Because Icaza managed to make Qt, and thus KDE, look bad over a licensing shit storm.

It is sadly really how much of Linux DE decisions have been made on political grounds.

Are you advocating that software such as Qt version 1 as of 1998 that is neither available under a license that meets the FSF's Free Software criteria nor the OSI's Open Source criteria nor Debian's DFSG should be a core part of the GNU/Linux desktop?

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