[openbox] Fighting Gnome

[Robbie Smith]

On 15/07/13 16:54, Johan Vromans wrote:
> Robbie Smith <zoqaeski at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> It’s pretty involved to set up, but I wrote a “tutorial” here:
>> https://github.com/zoqaeski/systemd-user-units [...] There are a few
>> userland daemons I have which systemd cannot control properly,
>> Pulseaudio being one of them.
>
> Thanks for the extensive info. Unfortunately it gives me the feeling
> that I'm trading in one big, uncontrollable desktop system for yet
> another big and uncontrollable system. Systemd is very much a work in
> progress and heavily underdocumented.

The manual pages help a lot and are quite well written. What is lacking 
are working examples to show how it all fits together; my experience has 
been very hit and miss.

If I control PulseAudio with systemd, it works fine with the occasional 
glitch, but more concerning is that the xfce4-panel volume plugin 
doesn’t pick it up and so I needed to restart the panel and then 
reselect the sound card *each time I logged in*. This is annoying, so I 
reverted that “feature”.

>
> On top of that - my current setup (using some selected xcfe components)
> seemed to work reasonably fine, until I plugged in the HDMI cable to the
> tv to watch a video. It turned out I had no sound, and virtually no
> means to get vlc fullscreen on the tv. I finally managed to show the
> video by using a test account that was configured (default) for Gnome
> Classic.

I’ve had trouble with HDMI before. Catalyst seems to require a reboot 
(or at the very least, a restart of X) to get the screen resolutions 
right; PulseAudio handles sound OK but you need to set the output on a 
per-application basis, and remember to set it back after you’re done.

>
> So basically I'm back at square one. A modern desktop based linux distro
> like Fedora seems to be so tangled up with all kinds of tools and
> utilities that it is no longer possible to have a non-standard setup
> that is functional in all aspects. Since with Gnome 3 they abandoned the
> window manager component it may turn out the be impossible to run a
> decent wm like openbox instead.

I use Arch Linux so I get total freedom but also the responsibility to 
ensure it all fits together. If it breaks, I’m largely on my own, moreso 
because my setup is experimental. I’ve been using systemd like this for 
nearly six months with no major issues, and it simplified my setup a 
lot, as I’ve been able to unify everything with a few commands.

I’ve been testing the Cinnamon DE as well, and I’ve even had luck 
integrating systemd with it, to some extent. It’s possible, but not easy 
until you’re familiar with how each component works.