My ideal desktop GUIs

Sun, 24 May 2026 13:48:25 GMT

With the recent resurgence in using and maintaining legacy software with projects like XLibre and gtk2-ng, I started to rethink my own desktop strategy. Did I want to take the easy route and update a lot of legacy gtk2 software? There certainly are enough choices in software that work with gtk. I did build XLibre (on Debian with musl) and gtk2-ng (on Debian with musl and on Windows with original MinGW) from source. I haven't shared the build scripts for XLibre but I did upload some of my build scripts for gtk2-ng in case they may be of use: https://git.devuan.org/lmemsm/bldgtk After the experience, I found myself wanting a more lightweight alternative even more than before. So what would a more lightweight desktop environment look like? Glad you asked.

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Lightweight Desktop Software

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:04:56 GMT

One thing I've wanted for a while now is a lightweight collection of desktop applications. Since my preference is for cross-platform software, it would be nice to work with applications that don't lock you into a particular system. So, you could use them with X or Wayland or nano-x or even in framebuffer mode. Operating systems like XFDOS showed you can put together a desktop collection that not only works on Linux or Windows but would even port to platforms like FreeDOS.

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