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#51 Re: Off-topic » XFCE is building a new WM and compositor for Wayland » 2026-02-10 21:25:56

It's the GTK3 adoption that had made it a pretty sluggish DE in my experience. Thunar also takes centuries to load up thumbnails in a directory (such as Downloads). Older versions did not have this issue, and it didn't matter if you only had five files or five hundred -- everything loaded blinking fast.

With RAM prices getting ridiculous, it's not really an option to have to use a lighter WM or DE to cope with the resource hogging.

#52 Re: Documentation » An unofficial Guide to runit on Debian-derived distros » 2026-02-10 20:29:27

Thanks for this. Runit service implementation in Debian-based distros is still severely lacking compared to other distros such as Void or Artix. Devuan's implementation simply adds a coat of paint over the already existing SysVinit services.

#53 Re: Devuan » Proposal "Devuan User Repository" » 2026-02-06 23:18:16

If you are unregistered, FDN locks you out of reading an entire thread after the third post. They are also Anubised and require JavaScript enabled to access the forums. Their search system has a really long wait time between searches, and everything is completely unorganized.

#54 Re: Devuan » Proposal "Devuan User Repository" » 2026-02-06 21:58:54

fsmithred wrote:

Also, I found an old version of hot-babe from medibuntu on my hard drive. I installed that on chimaera and there are a couple of differences. The buntu version has a nudity warning in a debconf dialog so you can cancel the install if you think you might be offended; that's missing in the DUR build. And buntu puts it in the Accessories menu instead of the Games menu. Other than that, they seem to be the same. I might need to compile a kernel to get a more thorough test.

That was the same experience I had with regards to the Medibuntu version, except using Daedalus (only had to chase down one obscure dependency). It's also using GTK2, whereas I can see that this reupload (which I did catch earlier, Exponentialmatrix, thank you) is now using GTK3.

#55 Re: Off-topic » XFCE is building a new WM and compositor for Wayland » 2026-02-05 23:26:34

I plan on trying it soon on a VM. CTK would at least mitigate much of the GN*ME stupidity along the way. I hope more GUI software will switch to it if they are hesitant on GTK4 or Qt.

greenjeans wrote:

They need to roll back some Mate goofiness, particularly in Caja. And dump the damn mixer.

There was an attempt to fork MATE as OpenMATE, but the author suddenly vanished (along with his GitHub repository). Totally not suspicious at all... 🤔

#56 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » [SOLVED] Devuan Excalibur install and Pipewire. » 2026-02-05 23:19:35

Just as I'm sure Gentoo's forum community would get sick and tired of hearing about Debian or Devuan being recommended over the distro they're platformed on, so I am in agreement there. Post #15 has no place on the official Devuan support forum.

#57 Re: Off-topic » XFCE is building a new WM and compositor for Wayland » 2026-02-05 21:55:02

Thankfully, if we follow what CAFE (fork of MATE) is doing, particularly CTK (fork of GTK3), we just may be able to avoid GN*ME's further enshittification for the foreseeable future. You can also download the official DEB files here if you don't want to or can't compile for some reason.

#58 Re: Off-topic » XFCE is building a new WM and compositor for Wayland » 2026-02-05 20:17:50

Why they are drinking the Wayland Kool-Aid is beyond me. Wayland has been in development for nearly two decades, yet it still can't do a couple of really essential things that X11 had already been doing since the 1990s.

Xfce went downhill after 4.12. It's no longer "lightweight" or "fast". They should've combined forces with MATE devs to fork and maintain GTK2, instead of just sucking up to GN*ME. Just watch, it's going to get worse as GTK3 gets phased out for GTK4, which will obliterate what few "options" users had then.

#59 Re: Devuan » Kde and Systemd - In the News » 2026-02-04 22:39:56

greenjeans wrote:

@brocashelm, I probably understand your frustration with gtk 3 better than most right now due to immersion for the last year, it's a real pain to deal with. But it's likely the best candidate for forking gtk, the right group of smart people could fix a lot of it's shortcomings and unneeded complexities.

Probably best to start looking into CTK, which is a fork of GTK3 (used for CAFE, a fork of MATE).

Even still, there's a lot that you could do with GTK2 comparatively (two that I can recall being forked are STLWRT and a debloated fork). I would consider no Wayland support a _feature_. smile

#60 Re: Devuan » Kde and Systemd - In the News » 2026-02-04 11:06:21

Well, it's a shame that GTK2 wasn't forked before MATE made the full switch over to GTK3. It's the only workable GUI toolkit in my experience, as I find modern forms of GTK and Qt too restrictive and bloated. I had to mix older Devuan and Debian (pre-Systemd infection) repositories to get the preferred versions of software that I needed. My systems all only have very, very few programs depending on GTK3 (no GTK4 at all) and Qt5 (no Qt6 at all).

I really wanted to like TDE, but it's a bit wonky to set up, and the hard dependency on Konqueror (a shitty file manager and an even shittier Web browser in one) is a major turnoff. If and when I am "forced" to stop using older Xfce for the sake of shiny new shit, and I'd depend on a DE, I would just fuck with LXQt and do whatever it takes to keep as little GN*ME or GTK+ as possible.

#61 Re: Devuan » Proposal "Devuan User Repository" » 2026-02-03 20:42:36

steve_v wrote:

Devuan as a whole is largely fine

Exactly. The other distros just don't do it for me much, regardless of the politics. I don't even use mainline Devuan -- I personally base all my installs on Refracta for having much better defaults for an as-minimalist-as-possible use case for Xfce. ALSA instead of PulseAudio, no metapackages, a fine-tuned magic SysRq key configuration, and a few other user-specific tweaks that make it a more appealing experience.

If not for Devuan or antiX, I probably would've just stuck with a Slackware derivative of some sort (like Salix or Slackel). At least unlike Debian with its estranged recent history and corporate-backed "decisions", they still have their founder involved and a community backing him with a philosophy that remains unchanged since 1993.

#62 Re: Devuan » Proposal "Devuan User Repository" » 2026-02-02 21:46:48

Sorry, but playing with CSS files is not at all congruent with making Devuan a usable OS -- any more so than what Greenjeans has already provided to the community out of his own kind efforts.

Three years ago, we had a user who put in the effort to help Devuan by creating a DVD set production script and a survey of user-made content. There was a lot of potential to help the project out in both cases, but of course, he was bullied and driven away by a few people in position of power over a non-issue (source). Not long after, one of the staff members unilaterally removed the quote-to-reply functionality without consulting the active userbase first, just because of said non-issue that bothered said staff member.

Had said incident not happened, he would have likely contributed directly to the releases of Daedalus and now Excalibur, as well as the next testing version Freia. Instead of throwing all this bureaucratic crap on regular users offering to volunteer in SOME form, maybe consider that they (we) are the ones who keep Devuan's wheels spinning, and without these users, Devuan loses users to another distro like Artix or even Gentoo.

#63 Re: Devuan » Proposal "Devuan User Repository" » 2026-02-02 19:24:49

greenjeans wrote:

Wow, don't know what I did to deserve that after 10 years with Devuan. sad

Pretty sure I made some contributions along the way, but as I don't keep score I couldn't give you a breakdown or a total.

Also pretty sure i've mentioned multiple times that I have accelerated my learning curve by many orders of magnitude this year, with one of the goals of that being able to help more, maybe maintain some packages at least.

And you have, and will (hopefully) keep doing that! I don't currently have a use case for the software and scripts you've released at this time, but it's seriously cool to see more love for YAD (I see you're a regular at the BunsenLabs forums, too wink).

#64 Re: Devuan » Proposal "Devuan User Repository" » 2026-02-02 10:31:17

You can also use EasyRPG Player to play those games natively. wink

#65 Re: Off-topic » I saw some opinions in a locked thread » 2026-02-02 10:26:08

"Right-wing nuts" and Reddit should never belong in the same sentence, ever.

#66 Off-topic » R.I.P. Didier Spaier (Slint) » 2026-02-02 09:02:07

brocashelm
Replies: 0

Got the unfortunate news (link) that Didier Spaier, the creator of Slint, has passed away.

While I never personally interacted with him, I remember his very helpful posts at the Salix (which he also contributed a lot to) and LinuxQuestions.org forums. Thanks for everything, and rest in peace.

[slint] Very sad news

    From: Philippe Delavalade <philippe.delavalade@xxxxxxxxx>
    To: slint@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
    Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:18:02 +0100

Dear all.

I am very sad to inform everyone that our friend Didier died last week.

Early 2015, I asked on the slackware list if brltty could be added in the
installer ; Didier answered promptly that he could do it on
slint. Afterwards, he worked hard so that slint became as accessible as
possible for visually impaired people.

You all know that all these years, he tried and succeeded to answer as
quickly as possible to our issues and questions.

He will be irreplaceable.

Regards.

--
Philippe
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#67 Re: Devuan » Proposal "Devuan User Repository" » 2026-02-02 01:13:18

exponentialmatrix wrote:

There was a long time ago a package with a cartoon girl on the desktop that lost more of her clothes the hotter the CPU was... I don't believe today debian would ever accept such a package ever again.

That's Hot Babe (hot-babe). I got the last DEB binary from Medibuntu working just fine on Daedalus...

#68 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] how start ntp? » 2026-02-01 01:49:13

Can't recommend OpenNTPD enough. It also works really well with Runit.

Zero issues with any time synchronization here.

#69 Re: Off-topic » [SOLVED] Identify old distro mascot. » 2026-02-01 00:08:02

The only thing to keep in mind with Slackware is that its package management does not use automatic dependency tracking, which means that you will often have to install everything but the kitchen sink to avoid problems.

If that's not your jam, but you still want to explore the distro, try out Salix, which -- on top of having automatic dependency tracking with the Apt-Get-like package manager Slapt-Get-- has the largest official repository of all the Slackware-based distros (most of them compiled straight from the SlackBuilds).

15.0 (for both Slackware and Salix) is the current stable release, and is comparable to Debian Bullseye (which Devuan Chimaera is based on). You can add specific third-party repositories for newer or otherwise missing packages, but that's not needed when you can just rely on using SlackBuilds.

#70 Re: Devuan » Proposal "Devuan User Repository" » 2026-01-31 22:33:20

This idea has been suggested many, many times in the past (in different incarnations) -- and the responses are the same as ever: put in the effort yourself or nothing will happen.

The focus of Devuan is removing Systemd and replacing its bits and pieces with Elogind, ConsoleKit2, Seatd, etc. where unavoidable. With Debian furthering the enshittification -- and now with Excalibur's release basing on Trixie -- those aforementioned bits and pieces are much harder to avoid now. That's where our collective efforts should be: to keep Systemd and other "fix what isn't broken" mechanisms at bay.

There are countless distros that are more newbie-focused that you could use, or else use a Devuan respin that meets your needs. You could always just install ExtRepo if you need third-party repositories for whatever reason. AppImages also work without affecting your system.

I don't see why we need a further stirring of the pot.

#72 Re: Other Issues » Deleted Post/Topics - do they count? » 2026-01-09 21:05:44

I don't know if FluxBB has the ability to set posts made in any forum section to not count towards your overall post count. If that were the case, then the user might be convinced that their post was "deleted" (i.e. the count went down), but the moderator actually just moved it to an inaccessible section that doesn't add to that metric.

#73 Re: Off-topic » GTK2 Removed from Arch's Repositories » 2026-01-08 23:03:23

Debian will be removing GTK2 from its repositories before Forky. You heard that right.

Hi all,

the Debian GNOME team has a goal of removing gtk+2.0 from Forky before
the release of Debian 14 in 2027
.

Debian is not the only distro doing this. A few months ago, Arch Linux
removed GTK 2 from its official (non-AUR) repositories [1]. RHEL 10 was
released earlier in 2025 without GTK 2.

gtk3 was released 15 years ago. Debian has had the stable 3.24 series
[2] for more than 7 years.

Most affected packages [3] had bugs filed against them for this issue
in 2020. Some exceptions include packages that gained a gtk2 dependency
after that date or packages that weren't in Testing then (like openjdk-
8) or for input methods and themes. The list of currently affected
packages is less than 25% as long as the list was in 2020.

One blocker towards finishing this transition is that the graphical
Debian Installer still uses gtk2.

As mentioned in our 2020 MBF [4], besides being unmaintained for years,
GTK 2 does not support either HiDPI or native Wayland.

On behalf of the Debian GNOME team,

Matthias Geiger <werdahias>

#74 Re: Freedom Hacks » Switching to GTK2 from GTK3 on Post-Beowulf Devuan Releases » 2025-11-28 23:02:46

vulpine wrote:

Has anyone managed to build spacefm or debianize spacefm for Excalibur yet? Upstream Debian did something shady and replaced the spacefm package with gtk3 whereas previously spacefm was gtk2 (congruent with upstream spacefm's recommendations) and there was a seperate packge spacefm-gtk3 if you wanted that. This was done by the "debian gnome team".

Unfortunately building spacefm yourself on Excalibur isn't so easy. There's some things that needs to be patched in the source code. Also using the gtk3 version isn't usable because of constant segfaults, clipboard not working, gtk3 breakage and mess.

Secondly claws-mail maintains a separate gtk2 branch. I've managed to compile that and use it with upstream Debian made claws-mail gtk3 even though it's a separate branch. This is working and continues to work after the upgrade but compiling and installing from source leaves it out from apt's package management. There's now been some minor updates to the gtk2 branch of claws-mail I'd like to install but it's not so easy tracking claws-mail releases anymore.

Surely someone has done this work before? I don't want to rebuild and repackage these things if somebody else has already done that.

You could simply pin or hold the version of SpaceFM that you installed from Daedalus, which is still GTK2. As it hasn't had any upstream changes since early 2018, it's safe to say the package hasn't implemented any new features or critical bug fixes over time. The last significant thing I remember being that the thumbnail issue was fixed. You could just wait a short while when launching it or disable thumbnails altogether. It's still way faster than Thunar.

Also, the last version of Claws Mail that you can build with GTK2 is the 3.x.x series. The last Debian build of it in that is 3.18.0-1. As of 4.x.x, you must use GTK3 or newer. It will complain if your version of GTK is "outdated".

#75 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » How to change the Login background in Excalibur ? » 2025-11-28 22:51:01

Are you logged in as root in a graphical session (not recommended) or using something like Sudo in a terminal window (recommended)? For the latter, just refer to Rbit's post on locating specific configuration files and append a command such as Nano or Vim to them.

For example, typing in sudo nano /etc/slim.conf will escalate user privileges by allowing you to directly modify the respective file. Make your changes, and then save with Ctrl+O. If you want to try a different preinstalled theme, you can then use cd /usr/share/slim/themes/ and type ls within that directory to view the available themes to choose from for the configuration file.

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