Re: [tlug] Desktop alternatives

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Daniel A. Ramaley writes:

 > What am i missing? What does a desktop environment offer that a
 > plain window manager can't do? I don't care about the application
 > integration;

Well, you probably don't want a *plain* window manager; you'd like to
have some session management features as well.  Most WMs do provide
enough of that (eg, the ability to start a few terminals and maybe
emacsen and/or browsers, maybe some applets like clocks and docks,
etc), though.

Basically, a desktop environment provides advanced session management
(you could in theory get that from a standalone session manager, but
there aren't any that are any good, and few apps that support the
protocol except as part of a DE), configuration management (this is
closely related to session management, which is why the decent session
managers are all DE-dependent), and application integration, in a
standardized (and usually greatly simplified[1]) workflow.  Anybody
who's been in the business for very long doesn't need any of that, and
the standardized workflow will typically cause a lot of annoyance.

But for newbies, it makes them productive (in the output/per hour >
0.0000 sense) very quickly.  This is not obviously a good thing (you'd
like a lower bound on output/hour, which DEs don't provide ;-), but
it's not obviously a bad thing, either.


Footnotes: 
[1]  In the sense of "removing options", not in the sense of "sensible
defaults so you hardly ever need options".