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Colin Walters Talks About Debian On The Desktop
An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com caught up with Colin Walters of the Debian Desktop subproject. Launched in late October, the project aims to simplify Desktop Linux. Walters' discusses the project goal to offer 'Software which Just Works' for home and office, new user and expert ... "
It's not a replacement for either X as a windowing system or Gnome/KDE as desktop environments. It's more of a bringing together of what is available to a tighter binding so that a user can say "I want x type of desktop" (say, developer or a user) and Debian will create such an environment.
Additionally, any environment which wishes to be included as a DebianDesktop must meet a minimum set of requirements.
Locations which explain it fair better than I probably have are:
DebianDesktop
Debian Desktop Wiki
Debian Desktop Project Goals
Debian Desktop Tenets
As far as I can tell: none of the above ;-)
It's a movement to create a better oiled desktop within Debian. I.e, make sure that GNOME and KDE desktop environments install correctly and with the minimum of fuss, have the setting up of X "as easy and foolproof as possible."
It's not a change in X or GNOME/KDE code, but rather a change in which the Debian distribution will handle the installation and configuration of them. The term "wrappers" would probably too coarse a word for it, but it'll be a collection of tools which help make the desktop environment setup as nice as possible.
The Debian Desktop's project wiki has more details about the project's goals and proposals. It sounds like they are following some of the Red Hat 8.0 lead and trying to create a more unified, task-based system. Their proposals are more than just a new GUI.
cpeterso
I strongly reccomend steering clear of fvwm2 - IceWM is a better choice in basically every way, I think it even has a smaller disk and RAM footprint actually.