On 9/14/24 6:23 AM, Andreas Sturmlechner wrote:
> 1) overall small impact on binary size, no runtime implications for X users
> 2) desktop profile definition is "minimal" USE flags, not necessarily "legacy"
> 3) plenty of "minimal" gui-wm/* exist, so X WMs can't claim that space
> 4) KWin is not just used with Plasma, but also as LXQt default, and both 
> Plasma as well as Gnome have plenty of desktop profile users for some reason 
> (mostly no-multilib of course ...)


I suppose it is technically "minimal" to have either one or the other
but not both...

Which one deserves to be the "minimal default"? That is a harder
question to answer. But at least selectively there's a reason to have
various packages such as toolkits default to X support for ABI reasons
(this argument can of course be made for wayland too) and there's a
surprising amount of software out there that is X11-specific from the
days when it was less common to use generic toolkits such as Gtk / Qt,
which I guess leads us to: xwayland.

Anyway, I'll just add -wayland to make.conf to stem the flood, I
suppose. My DE is hardly "minimal" but it is certainly X-only.

Perhaps what we really need is an easier way to handle custom user
profiles via mixins, so that e.g. people who use lxqt don't have to beg
for a dedicated official profile.


> 5) deduplication++


At least this could be handled by making a
profiles/targets/desktop/wayland and having both plasma and gnome parent
themselves to that?

It's not really much of an argument, even if it is only added on to 4
other arguments, to talk about deduplication as a reason to modify
end-user experiences. The arguments for end-user experiences should
relate to solving end-user problems, which is what points 1-4 argue
based on. Internal implementation details should remain internal
implementation details, and it seems we do (happily) have the technology
to make them stay that way.


-- 
Eli Schwartz