[desktop-lite] Ability to use another Desktop Environment than Fluxbox

[phorcys420]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently writing a template that uses XFCE as the desktop environment instead of Fluxbox and I'd like to use the noVNC part of the desktop-lite module without having to install Fluxbox.

Any of the following methods would accomplish what I want :

• Split desktop-lite and noVNC into two separate features (either have the user use both or use dependsOn in desktop-lite)
• Ability to choose DE (time-consuming and can't be exhaustive)
• Ability to toggle off installation of Fluxbox

I do think splitting would be the best but it might be a hassle.

[samruddhikhandale]

Hi 👋

Thanks for your suggestion!

Split desktop-lite and noVNC into two separate features (either have the user use both or use dependsOn in desktop-lite)

As the current feature is widely used and this would be a breaking change, we would like to wait and get more interest from the community before making this change.

Ability to toggle off the installation of Fluxbox

This should be doable. @phorcys420, would you be interested in contributing a PR with this change? We can add a new boolean Feature option to control the installation of Fluxbox.

[phorcys420]

Ability to toggle off the installation of Fluxbox

This should be doable. @phorcys420, would you be interested in contributing a PR with this change? We can add a new boolean Feature option to control the installation of Fluxbox.

Definitely!
Will look into it, let's say this week or next week as the change should be relatively easy!

[phorcys420]

Split desktop-lite and noVNC into two separate features (either have the user use both or use dependsOn in desktop-lite)

As the current feature is widely used and this would be a breaking change, we would like to wait and get more interest from the community before making this change.

Hey, actually I didn't explain myself properly!

I meant separating Fluxbox and noVNC into two separate features, where the desktop-lite feature would depend on both fluxbox and noVNC.
But even then, I don't know if you could pass arguments from the desktop-lite feature to the noVNC feature

[phorcys420]

@samruddhikhandale while implementing this PR, I've noticed that the desktop-lite feature installs quite a lot of unneeded software by default that template administrators might want or not (xterm, eterm, nautilus, mousepad, seahorse, nano, htop, ncdu, tilix).

I would like to be able to pick and choose, for this I think best would be to implement additionalPackages and installTilix (there is some logic involved for tilix) parameters, should I open another issue so we can discuss what is best or should I directly submit a PR?

There is also some stuff that can be optimized/improved but I'll probably PR those soon.