Now that's an interesting idea. But what is the effect of disabling them to the average end user?

I'm assuming it will just prevent auto-mounting, which I have no need of anyway. I use Rox-Filer and it will mount things in fstab when you click on the mount points. It's exactly what I need, because I don't always want it to auto-mount. Sometimes I want to read a disk raw without mounting it.

So disabling all such things only affects auto-mounting, but not manual mounting as an unpriveleged user without write access to "/etc/fstab", nor other things like restart/hibernating the system as an unpriveleged user from the console ... Did I understand it right?

I don't know about restarting or hibernating as I don't use these. I would have to test it. As long as you are in the power group I think you should be able to restart and hibernate as user.

Thank you! I didn't know of the power group before. -- Always thought I was able to shutdown because I was directly in front of the console; not even tried remotely.

There's this article about GNOME losing relevance:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTE0ODI

Maybe GNOME will disappear and spare us their bad code and dependency hell.

It looks like they're planning to conquer the world instead.

From my limited perspective, I would say the World Domination Plan is actually wet paper.

... wet and sticky.

LMAO.

More traditional desktops like Xfce and KDE are really easier to migrate into from other operating systems. The problem of GNOME is, it's getting too heavy handed against it's own software and pulling further and further into the system rather than being modular.

Now GNOME's libraries and programs that can be used on non-GNOME environments work very well often even in KDE and Xfce and dependencies now are just a fact of life. I don't see the programs themselves going away per-say, but I do see a time when the actual GNOME desktop environment will not be around.

In another part of LQ I suggested a vanilla linux sans KDE or GNOME libraries. That didn't fly well.

Looks like FVWM and mc for me.

Sure, why not? That's what I do (well, fvwm anyway .. never got in the habit of using mc, tend to use bash instead for file management).

Eschewing with the kdei and/or kde directories are a nice way to slim down an already slim distribution, though with how massive even thumbdrives have gotten there's not much point.

If all you need is a no-frills window manager with oodles of configurability and all the virtual desktops you can eat, with no need for a "desktop environment", fvwm is just fine. And unlike kde and gnome, fvwm is pretty much guaranteed to remain sane and solid forever.

Xfce is still fairly lightweight compared to KDE and GNOME in spite of it's dependencies that keep getting added. I've installed Xfce onto systems and don't have anywhere near the same level of tools and software KDE and GNOME include.

I'll stick to Xfce anyways. Even if it's growing as a desktop environment and taking more stuff into it, it's still faster, more compact, and more featured as a complete environment.

Is udisks2 really necessary ?

For Xfce, then yes...