TeamBlackFox wrote:
It won't, you're going to break the distro trying to remove it... You can always move to another distro, but I'm sure thats not something you're wanting to do. Gentoo and Slackware currently do not utilise systemd, but thats probably not gonna change. Take it from me - I left GNU/Linux for BSD, not only for systemd, but for other reasons.
Debian has experimantal OpenRC support, the sysvinit wrapper deal that Gentoo developed. Not sure on the status of it, though. Personally, I use "file-rc" in my Debian VM and like it quite nicely. It wraps sysvinit, but gives you the convenience of editing a simple text file to change the start/stop order of services, then you just run Debian's update-rc.d script to make the changes active.
That said, as a current Gentoo developer, I can tell you that we're working towards supporting both OpenRC (default) and systemd in our distro. Choice is a big deal in Gentoo, which can sometimes drive people insane :). When the udev/systemd merger was announced, it was a few of our devs that kickstarted the eudev project off to maintain a version of udev that wasn't slaved to systemd. And in a pinch, you can finagle busybox's "mdev" into working well as a udev replacement, too.
TeamBlackFox wrote:
Re sluggishness its probably not the WM, but Systemd. The overhead it adds will slow down your computer. I'd suggest rolling back to Wheezy or else migrating to another distro. There is no reason that a clean OS install/upgrade should be any slower, especially with LXDE.
I've got my beef with systemd as well, but systemd the software apparently runs pretty fast. I haven't heard of slowdowns much due to it. Many of its problems seem to stem more from its design choices, such as it replacing your system logger, cron daemon, init system, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus the whole logging to binary formats that really rankles old-school UNIX people. Now, the people behind systemd....yeah, I won't go there. I think their various statements on the public mail archives on the web speaks for itself regarding their attitude. I plan on sticking with OpenRC as long as feasibly possible. If Linux becomes permanently wedded to systemd in the future...well, we'll just have to see if we get there.
TeamBlackFox wrote:
Re desktop environment, CDE is always an option, and with some tuning you can make it look/operate like 4DWM.
I tried the 2.2.1 cut of CDE after someone wrote a basic Gentoo ebuild for it. It's got a *lot* of work ahead of it. I heard the 2.2.2 release came out not long ago, so I probably need to try that soon to see what got fixed. But in a nutshell, CDE is its own X server I believe (right now, anyways), and carries its own copies of common X11 tools, many of which were never compiled with gcc and thus, tend to really irk the compiler off which causes build failures. I hope it sees active development, as I found CDE to be quite usable when I had to maintain an HP-UX server once. And I've grown somewhat attached to the Motif look of it.
As for faking the 4DWM look, since that Maxx desktop project appears to be dead, the other option is fvwm. Supposed to be a very highly-configurable X11 WM, and there's at least one IRIX-like theme that I know of for it.
TeamBlackFox wrote:
Also, Enlightenment is another I've used, very appealing but also lightweight.
I think you're talking about Enlightenment 0.16. Enlightenment 0.17 and up basically have an entire framework behind them now which is supposed to be pretty good. So maybe not lightweight anymore. Dunno, haven't tried to install 0.17+ yet. Doesn't seem to get as much attention as Gnome or KDE, though :/
Statistics: Posted by Kumba — Wed Sep 10, 2014 7:28 pm