Replacing Zenity with lightweight alternative

General Discussion
1

Could we replace Zenity with lightweight alternative?

I am having this debian-11-minimal template without Zenity installed and just found out “Qubes Backup restore” needs Zenity that is executed from /etc/qubes-rpc/qubes.SelectFile to select a file.

In my case Installing

  • Zenity will install 225 packages and need 492MB disk space.
  • Yad will install 34 packages and need 77MB disk space.

The need to install half a gigabyte to display the dialog seems disk space excessive to me. The reason seems to be mentioned in this comment

I tried to replace
exec zenity --title="Qubes" --file-selection
in /etc/qubes-rpc/qubes.SelectFile with
exec yad --title="Select file" --file
and it works.

I dont see any other script in /etc/qubes-rpc/ that would need zenity.

Are there any other reason which would make use of Zenity that would block using alternative like Yad?

6 Likes
2

I co-sign that.

3

No intrinsic reasons, I think.

But minimal templates are meant for “advanced users” , and not suited
for every use.

Also, you should learn the use of parameters-

APT::Install-Recommends "0";
APT::Install-Suggests "0";

Which will cut the bloat by more than half.

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team. When I comment in the Forum or in the mailing lists I speak for myself.
4

The main reason zenity is so incredibly bloated on Debian (and Arch too) is that they build it with WebKitGTK support. Fedora thankfully doesn’t.

There’s a bunch of places where Qubes OS uses zenity:

https://github.com/search?q=org%3AQubesOS+zenity&type=code

5

Moving to General Discussion since this thread is actually Qubes OS specific.