Alternative to x11/gnome3 ?

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 08:43:58 +0700, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> sergio lenzi wrote:
> > > sergio lenzi wrote:
> > > > Well, you can always go back to the reliable gnome2 now AKA mate
> > > > you can use our "distribution" with more than 1800 packages for
> > > > amd64,
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Does your mate distribution support user swithing (please see the
> > > first mail in the thread)? If it does, what display manager does your
> > > mate distribution depend on?
> > > 
> > > 
> > Hello...
> > the user switching is done  not in the gdm, but inside the mate under
> > the "system tab in the" panel, that in this version (1.20) is not
> > avaiable, but
> > I will check the code, may be an option in the consolekit can make it
> > show up....
> 
> Any news?
> 
> > but if you log out, from mate, you can choose some options in the gdm
> > login, as language, xdmcp, ... 
> 
> The idea is that a second (third etc) user should be able to login
> without the first user logging out (and closing all her programs
> thereby), as available on Linux and Windows ("logoff" vs "switch
> user").

This kind of session management was first prominently
introduced on Mac OS X (early v10).


> > the switching you are looking for was available on mate 1.12 I
> > think... 
> > 
> > the distribution uses GDM 2.18.9  with  the full gdmsetup & friends... 
> > On NetBSD we use gdm 2.20.11   that is quite the same one... and yes,
> > we have mate 2.19 on NetBSD-8.0 for raspberry pi.
> 
> Am I right that gdm is the absolute requirement for user switching to
> work, no other display manager can do that?

It is a combination both of the desktop environment being
able to store program states (which programs opened, with
which files, in which state) and restore them again, maybe
like a form of "memory to file and back". Gnome 2 could do
this in combination with gdm. While the gnome session was
responsible for the storing / restoring part, gdm would
do the login of a different user, and also keep track of
users still logged in (in "stored state").

As Mate and Cinnamon claim to be Gnome 2 forks, it's at
least left to imagination that they should also include
this kind of functionality.



> And while we are at it, I have a couple of questions on Mate
> (now I have mate-1.18.0 from the vanilla FreeBSD packages):
> 
> 1. How do I totally disable all volume automounting in Mate/Caja? I'm quite
> happy with the system automonter and don't need no gvfs and other
> userland mounts (even more because they don't support Cyrillic
> filenames correctly).

There is a gvfs configuration entry (via gconf2, if I remember
correctly) that lets you select which devices or filesystem
types to mount or _not_ to mount. This is a convenient way
to suppress all automounting via the system (GUI + gvfs).

In the past, I had the exact opposite problem: I _wanted_ to
use the automounter from Gnome, but it didn't always work.
Gnome's automounter relies on HAL, so maybe changing the HAL
configuration is also a way to deal with it. So fiddling with
HAL, fighting system permissions from devfs.conf and devd.conf,
creating a "umount wrapper" which also calls media eject for
optical devices, and even adding a desktop icon "USB unmount"
were required to make it _partially_ work...

>From https://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/halfaq.html you can
check questions 2, 3, and 6.



> 2. The sound control app in Mate is completely unrelated to the real
> sound system of FreeBSD (as of 11.2 and mate-1.18.0). The volume and
> input/output controls do nothing. I have to use the good old
> /usr/sbin/mixer and "sysctl hw.snd.default_unit" to manipulate with
> sound. Is this my misconfiguration or Mate's fault?

Is it using the wrong mixer? Can you select a different mixer
device for the Gnome / Mate mixer control?

I fully understand that most GUI software is ported from Linux,
it's not a native BSD development result, so maybe it expects
some ALSA instead of the standard OSS...



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...