On Sun, 14 Nov 2021 12:43:13 -1000
"David W. Jones" <gnome@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:

I use XFCE. I have Trinity running on a VM. XFCE is better and lighter.

On November 14, 2021 10:27:48 AM HST, Brandon Hale <bthaleproductions@gmail.com> wrote:

I've never run Rox, but I just took a look at it. Maybe some 
alternatives that could be very similar in functionality are:

GNUStep

LXDE

Trinity Desktop (KDE3 Revived)

Mate Desktop (Gnome 2 Revived)

These all have their own applications I do believe and have a retro and 
lightweight feel to them. I know for a fact that LXDE will run on a 
potato. I use it on an old Acer Aspire One netbook. I run mate on my 
main machine and it uses modern gtk3 and is fast and featureful (just 
like I remember it back in 2009)!

I hope this helps. You can also pick and choose which applications you 
like best from all of these and run the ones that you like.

Brandon Hale

On 11/14/21 14:58, Will Godfrey wrote:  

On Sun, 14 Nov 2021 10:37:25 -0700
Bob van der Poel <bob@mellowood.ca> wrote:

Not to state the obvious ... but you could install Python2. 3 and 2 live
quite happily together.

On Sun, Nov 14, 2021 at 8:27 AM Will Godfrey <willgodfrey@musically.me.uk>
wrote:

For very many years I've been using the combination of OpenBox and ROX.
This
has provided a very lightweight and user-friendly interface. It's also
a good fit for the Raspberry Pi, and users unfamiliar with Linux seem to
take
to it quickly. However...

ROX filer itself is still fine after all this time, but ROX-Lib relies on
Python-2, so all apps using it are now dead - as is the rox -users list :(

I can get round most of the ones I use but the two I need are desktop
replacements for are the Archiving program (which handles a laundry list of
formats) and screen resolution manager (based on XrandR).

The usual web searches don't seem to show up anything useful.

Any suggestions appreciated.

Well, that proved rather interesting. The upgrade (devuan chimaera to be
precise) removed python2 and, critically, python-gtk2, but it left the old
entries in apt/sources.list so I was able to reinstall them. That's a bit more
breathing space, but the axe is bound to fall at some point, so I'd still like
to find alternatives.

The archiver is particularly good for newbies. It's drag-and-drop. Drop a
compressed file on it and it will decompress it, drop a plain file on it and it
will put up a menu of compression types. In both cases it *doesn't* delete the
source.

While I appreciate the suggestions for LXDE or XFCE, while both are
indeed lightweight, are a good fit for the overall setup, which is quite
deliberately RISCOS-like (which makes rather a good environment for an R-Pi).
I've been able to find a screen resolution program that works well, and is
indeed better than the original! That leaves just the archiver. This is a
hard nut to crack. I can't find anything that is simply drag and drop.

Possibly I could code this myself, but I've got quite enough on my plate as it
is :(

-- 
David W. Jones
gnome@hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://dancingtreefrog.com
"My password is the last 8 digits of π."