Experiment desktop UI without ROX

EasyOS, Quirky, and all the pups before, use Joe's Window Manager (JWM) for the system tray and menu, and ROX-Filer to manage the desktop icons and wallpaper. There have been some pups developed by the Puppy-community that use other desktop UIs, such as XFCE, but none, that I know of, were official pup releases.

On and off over the years, I have wondered about cleaning up the desktop. One issue, is you select a nice wallpaper, then it gets partly obscured by icons. Those icons might not match the wallpaper nor the overall theme, and they may be not obvious on a very "busy" wallpaper. I mean, getting the icons to look nice on top of the wallpaper is a challenge.

Besides, a leaner, less cluttered, desktop would be good.

Here is an experiment, placing the application and partition icons into JWM trays:

This is an attempt to give the wallpaper pride-of-place on the desktop, without icons scattered on it.

With this design, ROX-Filer is not needed at all to manage the desktop, it can be relegated to only being a file manager.

In the above experiment, ROX is still managing the wallpaper, but it doesn't have to. We are only having ROX manage the wallpaper so as to be able to display icons on top of it.

Any thoughts about this experiment?

If I do decide to go for this JWM-only desktop, or something similar, I won't burn the bridges. Will implement a global variable to switch between the two modes of desktop. A lot of work would be required to implement this.

EDIT 2021-11-17:
Thanks Sage, Bernie, John, dogle and Rudy for email feedback on this topic.

We are discussing this topic on the forum:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=4487   

Tags: easy