I’m daily driving Qubes OS with most VMs using a Kicksecure template. I’ve used Kicksecure 18 for some days but I wasn’t happy with LXQt and wanted to go back to XFCE and its app suite. I’ve created kicksecure-18-xfce template and I’m using it without issues for weeks now.
Would it be useful for anyone if I create a guide to create such Kicksecure Qubes template variant?
I’ve also installed Kicksecure on bare metal for a family member and switched to XFCE. The process is much more involved also considering XFCE has incomplete support for Wayland. Unless Kicksecure developers have interest in building such variant for bare metal, I don’t have the will to create a guide for that case.
In general I think XFCE still deserves its place in Kicksecure and in Linux distros that want to use a lightweight DE. I would love for Kicksecure to support both LXQt and XFCE, this way giving a Qt and a GTK option. If there is such interest for other users I’m ready to help achieve this goal.
I tried using LXQt and I love what they’re doing. In my opinion, at the moment, XFCE is still much more complete and usable even with experimental Wayland support.
XFCE has a new clear plan for building their own Wayland compositor based on Smithay. You can find info in “Alexxcon’s Software Development Blog“ at “Xfwl4 - The roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor“. This made me want to invest in XFCE and propose a variant for Kicksecure.
We’re generally fine with people posting solutions to issues they’re having, so I think a guide about how to install Xfce on Kicksecure would probably be welcome (assuming it doesn’t direct the user to do things that are unsafe from a security perspective).
Maintaining an official Xfce variant of Kicksecure is probably a lot of work. It would involve the introduction of as many as ten new images (Kicksecure VirtualBox Xfce, Kicksecure KVM Xfce, Kicksecure ISO Xfce, Whonix-Workstation VirtualBox Xfce, Whonix-Gateway VirtualBox Xfce, Whonix-Workstation KVM Xfce, Whonix-Gateway VirtualBox Xfce, Kicksecure Qubes Xfce, Whonix-Workstation Qubes Xfce, Whonix-Gateway Qubes Xfce) that would have to be officially supported, along with the metapackages for them. The maintenance burden would have to be something a community member was willing and able to maintain themselves, and if they stopped maintaining it, it would likely become deprecated and removed very quickly due to the scale of work it would entail. (I’m not sure if we would accept it at all due to how much work it would add, but that isn’t my decision.) Additionally, the experimental Wayland support in Xfce is missing many important things in Debian 13 that were, in our research, even worse than the things LXQt was missing. See:
Reading both links from Patrick and your reply arraybolt3, I understand that posting a guide is generally fine whereas further development discussion regarding an official XFCE variant for Qubes template and/or bare metal images need a different path.
I’ll post a guide here so that you can both review it. I’m fine being it a community unofficial guide and I’m willing to maintain it.
Remove LXQt and other Qt apps that are replaced by XFCE apps. Note that this will remove sdwdate-gui app as well. If you need it, follow optional step 5.
Additionally, removing a core metapackage without installing some other core metapackage can result in issues getting software updates later in the future. You probably should at least install kicksecure-qubes-cli after doing this.