Selfcontaining OS - source of everything included in the install

[lm8]

Have you checked out the gtk2-ng project ( https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng/ ) being discussed on the Devuan Users Forum?  If you're working with gtk2, it's worth investigating.  They're updating it and fixing many of the compiler warnings need to build it with more modern compilers.  There's also plans to improve the file browser.

Are you planning on building Audacity with WxWidgets on gtk2 or gtk3?  Have you looked at the fork Tenacity?

I've been using mupdf for PDF viewing and Bard with flite for ebook reading.  Both are pretty lightweight and low dependency.  I'm actually using a fork of mupdf (last GPL version before it went AGPL) along with pdftxt and sdlbook.

I used to use XFE.  Tried several others.  Worker is really nice and minimal dependencies.  I'm currently using SDL based fm.  I tried Fox Toolkit and several other lighter GUIs.  Gave up on Fox Toolkit after a while.  Not enough applications to make it worth continuing to build.  Although FXite is pretty nice.  I mostly work with FLTK, SDL and bsdcurses/pdcurses.  I've also been experimenting with OTK (OpenGL based Open Tool Kit at Sourceforge) and Raylib/RayGUI.

I build a lot of programs and libraries (on several operating systems) from source and I have shell scripts to allow me to build them in a reproducible manner.  If you'd like to share scripts or patches, let me know.