OS without a DE

Title says it all:
Using a linux operating system with no desktop environnement at all

Is it viable? Are there any big drawbacks? What's the best way to do it?

Attached: dis pengu goes nuts.jpg (129x160, 7K)

>LFS
Ah the memories.

Literally just init 3 though.

This is called a headless server and is as common as water you massive twat

I obviously meant it as a daily personal use. I was not talking about servers.

Yes, that's called a WM

It's not comfy at all.

Yes, I know, such as herbstluftwm.

But what I really want to know is the viability of it, what are the drawbacks and what's the best WM in your opinion.

Those were my questions actually

Viable for what?
Browsing, playing videos or play games, no. You need a graphical environment for this. Whether or not you need a DE, is Up to your definition. I think a panel and a window manager is a DE and I dont really see the benefit of removing either.
You could for example not have a panel, but then certain tasks become tedious like observing battery status, change wifi or see the time. Obviously you can do without these on a desktop or if you think hotkeys make these easier to manage.
For other stuff, sure.

>I obviously meant it as a daily personal use. I was not talking about servers.
you're only going to find out that most people using unix or linux with no desktop/windows systems are people that are running servers, managing servers, etc. I use ubuntu server every day to do just that

It's fine and normal as fuck op just look to the desktop threads

> I think a panel and a window manager is a DE
They are not the same thing.
> You could for example not have a panel, but then certain tasks become tedious like observing battery status, change wifi or see the time
You can have a panel without a DE.

Your original question was badly phrased.
Let's assume you meant what the drawbacks of using herbstluftwm over KDE with herbstluftwm.
Obviously both are viable, but there are a ton of things you presumably want that isn't in the window manager.
Stuff like notifications, clipboard managers, sound managers, network managers etc will be things you install desperately. All visible applications are easy to spot which ones you want, but those will be installed manually as well.
The list is too long to write here, so it is faster to just try it in a virtual machine and then take not of what things don't work the way you want them to.

or i3

>viable
depends completely on your prefs

>drawbacks
maybe you don't like keyboard shortcuts

>best WM
install one and use it for two weeks and then you'll know what you personally prefer

That's actually a good idea, I will try some on a virtual machine and see how things go. Shame I didn't think of it before.

I will try i3 and herbstluftwm, but what is your favorite out of curiosity?

I gave you my definition; a DE is a wm + panel.
I say panel as it is shorthand for all the daemons you control with a panel.
A DE is just a term for All things that go into creating the desktop. Given there are so many different desktops out there this seems to fit all of them.
Otherwise, you have to be way too descriptive about what is and isn't a desktop and then it doesn't fit anything but one.
What is your definition?

I'm on XFCE. Have considered bspwm and i3. leaning towards the latter even though they've adapted the CoCK

A DE goes further. It has system menus, starters, status applets and even drag and drop possibility. In fact, most of them even come with softwares (text editor and file browser).
A panel is just one more building block of a DE, you can't just take it as a define characteristic of it.
Which means that if you say panel + wm = de, i could very well say menus + wm = de with the same logic.
Perhaps you meant that any addon on a wm turns it into a DE, but that's still shady. A DE is much more than just one applet or addon, it's a full kit.

>>drawbacks
>maybe you don't like keyboard shortcuts
If I were to switch to i3, I would rely way more on the mouse than I currently do when I use KDE.
I don't the keyboard vs mouse argument works with a lot of people.
You need more setup than just installing the WM to be able to use the computer 100% from the keyboard.
With a graphical interface, the buttons are meant to pressed with a mouse but that is not how people use a computer.
They grab the mouse, hover button to read the documentation, clicks it and then uses the hotkey or key sequence they just read from then on.
It is meant to teach people to use the application, not keep them from using the keyboard.
Going to another window to look up the online documentation, scroll through hours worth of reading to find something that could be described with 10 characters and proper placement is bad design IMO.
And the navigation being shifted from vim made me uninstall that shit so fast I never bothered to change it. I whish murder and famine to the developer who thought that was a good idea.

KDE doesn't even include their text editor by default anymore. I don't think this is a good measure. Uninstalling one application doesn't make it "not a DE" how many you need to uninstall is not really an argument I find exciting.
Nobody uses a computer without applications. If you use ls instead of a file manager to manage your files, you are just using a bad file manager.
If you solve the same roles a DE solves with other tools, you just have a different DE.
>it's a full kit
Sure, that is why I said panel as it is a bunch of tools that you need outside of the panel to have that available.
I use a panel for is managing networks, battery monitoring, sound management, notifications and observing which window is active.
Those things are what I consider essential to a panel I would use.
It gives me a way to interact with the computer as it were a literal desk with some buttons and meters to display stuff for me.
Remove a button and it is still a desk.
Put something different in it, still a desk.
Create a panel with no buttons and just print something from /proc/, still a desk.
Is one thing lighter than the other? Sure.
But most people tend to create something that is very close to what a regular DE offers in terms of usability.

Obviously a margarita is not the same as a meatlovers pizza, but they are both a pizza.

wmutils, it splits the functions of a regular wm into multiple dedicated tools that you can glue together with scripts to do whatever you want.

I've used bspwm and i3 before to do this exact thing. It becomes EXTREMELY functional but only after installing a lot of things to run in the background and by the time you are done you basically just have a custom built desktop environment (DE).

You can use it as a daily driver though. I did, and it was pretty good (and still is). Good luck, I recommend i3, bspwm, or herbsluftwm. i3 is probs the best since it will take you max like 3 days to configure to your liking.

emacs makes it viable

i must clarify im not talking about x11 emacs (although i could), since shell emacs works just fine

Same user here. If you want to do it without an X-server or wayland, you could also try using a terminal multiplexer as your "DE". For example, try tmux.

There are also a LOT of cli applications you can get. RTV for reddit, CMUS for music, RANGER for file managing, etc.

Yes. It is possible to live in a framebuffer console without X11, but it wouldn't be fun unless you're already proficient with POSIX shells

Not worth the pain. Minimal X11 with the VESA driver is only about 20mb of disk space even on ubuntu.

i3 or awesome wm. I personally use awesome all the time now, there's no drawbacks only advantages. You can always make a window to be "floating", which makes it act the same as DEs

JWM

literally every linux server ever

emacs is an operating system

There are WMs you can make look just like windows without installing a DE.

Pretty good OS, just needs a good text editor

Is IceWM any good?

super viable, i'm doing it right now.
debian minimal install + i3wm.
there are no big drawbacks. it keeps you from being lazy and just saving everything on your desktop.

>I have kate and always seen it installed, kwrite was included back in the day

Bump