Dan Ritter wrote:
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 10:06:32AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:As I have minimal to *NO INTERNET* access, when Debian 7.1 DVDs became available from vendors I purchased the 10 DVD set. I also purchased the live DVDs for Gnome, lxde, kde, and xfce. I did some test runs of each. I chose xfce for my initial Wheezy install based almost exclusively on "look and feel". It felt "comfortable" and seemed to express my somewhat vague ideas of how a GUI should 'act'. It was an educational experience. Each had something I'd like to see in an ideal installation. I also did more web browsing comparing "Desktop Environments" to "Windows Managers" and product comparisons within those classifications. /Questions 1. Given that I prefer LILO over GRUB and xfce over Gnome/lxde/kde, what GUIs should I investigate further.If you're happy with xfce, you shouldn't need to look further. xfce is a fully supported, first-class environment.
I don't _need_ to, but I'm involved with other projects which might benefit. Also I'm retired with lots of free time and I find the topic interesting.
If you're curious, you should probably look at some simpler systems, since GNOME and KDE are the heavier systems. Enlightenment, Openbox and awesome are probably good choices to gain breadth.
Someone in private mail suggested Enlightenment. Openbox was already on my list.
Desktop environments lean towards over kill. Enlightenment and awesome will be investigated further.
2. Given that internet is effectively non-existent and internal/external disk space is effectively unlimited, how can I make as many as possible of the DE &/or WM on the distribution DVD simply available to experiment with?apt-get install [metapackage name] for each of them. There's no restriction to only having one installed at a time, you know.
I hoped/suspected apt-get was the answer. But that why I phrased it in an open ended manner.
An implied questions include: how do I switch between them while comparing? will thy potentially interfere with each other? Thank you.