[ubuntu-studio-devel] availability of alternate DEs

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2018 06:59:29 +0000, jaquilina at eagleeyet.net wrote:
>On 2018-10-11 06:43, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> On Thu, 11 Oct 2018 06:31:01 +0200, Jonathan Aquilina wrote:  
>>> If the below is accurate what issues could be encountered in terms
>>> of configuration?  
>> 
>> For example an incomplete "NotShowIn" list for desktop files.
>> 
>> [rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ grep NotShowIn
>> /etc/xdg/autostart/xfce4-power-manager.desktop
>> NotShowIn=GNOME;KDE;Unity;MATE;
>> 
>> For example the preferences of a file manager are set to manage the
>> desktop and launching this file manager by a menu based on desktop
>> files, it gets launched without a no-desktop option.
>> 
>> [rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ grep Exec 
>> /usr/share/applications/caja.desktop
>> Exec=caja
>> [rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ caja --help | grep no-desktop
>>   --no-desktop                    Do not manage the desktop (ignore
>> the preference set in the preferences dialog).
>> 
>> Those are trivial issues for power users, but a newbie could be
>> confused.
>What would need to be done to cater for the newbies?

That's hard to say, since there are other config issues, such as
averaged settings for apps that a user might want to use with
different desktop environments, but by using different setting profiles.

1. Not all apps provide profiles.
2. Those apps that provide profiles, default to one profile.

I've written scripts to generate profiles even for window manager
sessions. A user could start different openbox sessions or a jwm
session by using different GTK, Qt and whatsoever settings, for example:

$ ls -hAl .gtkrc-2.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rocketmouse rocketmouse 42 Oct 11 10:06 .gtkrc-2.0 -> .gtkrc-2.0_openbox-profile-lcd-realignment

.gtkrc-2.0 isn't a file, it's a softlink generated when logging in.

For example:

[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ grep Exec /usr/share/xsessions/openbox-lcd-realignment.desktop | head -1
Exec=/usr/local/bin/openbox-profile-lcd-realignment
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ grep Exec /usr/share/xsessions/openbox-pre-summery.desktop | head -1
Exec=/usr/local/bin/openbox-profile-pre-summery
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ ls -hAl /usr/local/bin/openbox-profile-lcd-realignment /usr/local/bin/openbox-profile-pre-summery
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Aug 13  2017 /usr/local/bin/openbox-profile-lcd-realignment -> openbox-profile
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 May  4  2015 /usr/local/bin/openbox-profile-pre-summery -> openbox-profile

lightdm among other does provide the above sessions using
the /usr/share/xsessions/*.desktop files.

In /usr/local/bin/ are links against a script named openbox-profile.
Depending on the basename of the links, the script does things such as
e.g. generating a links to a .gtkrc-2.0 profile.