Re: [tlug] Running without Gnome/KDE/xfce/whatever. (was: Ubuntu 16.04-LTS Japanese Text Input)

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

Attila Kinali writes:

 > The user part you have to start yourself using `dbus-launch` in
 > your .xinitrc/.Xsession

Well, no, not on Debian; the system provides default scripts that do
fine for most users with a bit of customization (ie, setting
appropriate alternatives for /usr/bin/x-window-manager and
/usr/bin/x-session-manager).  *If* you provide your own .xinitrc or
.Xsession, that will completely replace the corresponding system
script, but that's rarely necessary.

 > > There's too much s**t that barfs, spasms, and dies if dbus isn't
 > > available (why?)
 > 
 > Because dbus has become the defacto IPC mechanism

I understand that.  Software should degrade gracefully if resources
(such as a system tray or dbus) are unavailable.  That's all I'm
saying.  Sometimes it can't (eg, the notify daemon is useless without
IPC), of course.  But I've run into programs that refuse to run
without dbus even though I personally didn't need the features they
implement via dbus.

 > for all kind of applications, even though the ICCCM explicitly
 > forbids any IPC outside X11.

No, it doesn't (unless it's been seriously revised for the worse since
I last needed to look at it closely).  The ICCCM certainly discourages
non-X IPC, because it prevents communication with clients running on
other hosts, but there are many reasons why a client would use non-X
IPC, even with other X clients.  Of course the most common reason for
using non-X IPC is because the other process isn't an X client.