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XFCE has a reasonably sane config format (XML for the most part, so at least not a binary database.).
#BLOCK POP ADS WINDOWS 10 SOFTWARE#
~50 active users on a server, software rendering KDE on the same CPU? No thanks.
#BLOCK POP ADS WINDOWS 10 FREE#
Animations and transparency and prettiness in general is almost free today, if you have a GPU.
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We also had some suspicions that KDE would run badly via Thinlinc, simply due to the amount of polish. Unfortunately we have some scientific software that pukes if you run it in KDE. If we had fewer users to support, this would probably have been a good solution. The config-system is sane, but exposes quite a lot of ways for individual users to shoot themselves in the foot. KDE is awesome, but bundles not only a kitchen sink, but an entire house. "Weird shit" as in 30s dbus-latency, which is an obvious disaster. But Mate (and probably Gnome too, we didn't dare try replicate it) does weird shit with dbus when you approach ~50 active users per Thinlinc-server (we have since optimized. Additionally we rely heavily on Thinlinc, a remote desktop solution for Linux that, btw, is excellent. The docs suck, and nothing works as expected. It also randomly breaks if the students log into their account from multiple places at the same time (somewhat valid use case here), and is apparently very sensitive to corruption. It's not very fun to configure from Puppet.
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If a student opens a ticket even remotely related to DE, we have them run a script to purge all settings first (script embedded as lightdm-option). Now, our goal is to provide a good template on first login. We had to back down from that, simply because no desktop environment allowed us to du that. Originally, we wanted to lock everything, except keyboard layout, wallpaper and accessibility. We evaluated Gnome, KDE and XFCE, but also inherited Mate. Additionally, everything goes via Puppet. So, first of all, we are in higher education here, which means that we can have pretty tight control of our environment, but a shitton of users and high requirements on availability.
