I installed Debian Sarge for the first time about a month ago, and have been
happily tinkering ever since.  I want to play with customizing my
"desktop".  I may be misguided here, but it seems to me that GNOME and KDE
don't offer a lot of opportunity for customization (?), and that I should
try using a window manager without a desktop environment, so that I can
have more "fiddle" room.

On the other hand, I use a few applications that seem to be built
specifically for KDE or GNOME.  So I guess my questions are:

1.  Will my KDE and GNOME apps work if I run X with a window manager like
fvwm or Sawfish or something, without a desktop environment?  How about
openoffice?

2.  Can I use other window managers with GNOME (instead of Metacity) or KDE
(instead of whatever it uses)?  Can I switch them easily?  Will the result
be worth working with?

3.  Just what *will* I lose by working with a straight WM and *no* desktop
environment?  Can you get all the same functionality by tinkering with WMs,
or do desktop environments really add functionality?

Thanks!

p.s.  Oh, I'm not all that comfortable with *where* to ask questions aobut
Linux.  Can anyone point me to good newsgroups/websites/lists/etc?  Thanks
again!

Dave

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On Mon, 21 Nov 2005 00:31:56 -0500, Dave M wrote:

> 1.  Will my KDE and GNOME apps work if I run X with a window manager like
> fvwm or Sawfish or something, without a desktop environment?

As long as the KDE libraries resp. GNOME libraries are still
installed they should work.

> How about
> openoffice?

No problem.

> 3.  Just what *will* I lose by working with a straight WM and *no* desktop
> environment?  Can you get all the same functionality by tinkering with WMs
,
> or do desktop environments really add functionality?

I guess you lose some eye-candy and gain some functionality ;-)

But I have to admit that I don't like desktop environments and use
ion3 myself. Other interesting WMs are IMO ratpoison, wmii, evilwm,
... All of them tiny and keyboard focused.

> p.s.  Oh, I'm not all that comfortable with *where* to ask questions aobut
> Linux.  Can anyone point me to good newsgroups/websites/lists/etc?  Thanks
> again!

Debian has a lot of mailing lists, too:
http://lists.debian.org/

gregor
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