consider packaging a "lite" version of riseup-vpn (or trimming size)

I've been thinking quite a bit about the downsides of embracing Qt5 with QML, dialogs and all that implies.

snaps are huge now; debian packages (or any other reasonable package manager) will be more manageable, for sure.

but this makes harder to maintain old systems, 32 bit builds etc. I totally understand why we went down this route (dialogs, portability, etc), I defended it and I still think it makes perfect sense in the long term, and in a world where connectivity and bandwidth limits are not real issues.

I know it sounds like work duplication and a burden for maintenance, so therefore a very bad idea, but I was considering seriously attempting some more minimalistic approach in parallel. I don't want to go back to the go-systray, since it clearly had a lot of limitations in terms of UI elements to build upon, but I was open to considering possibilities around building a different version that uses only Qt5Core and links against the bitmask library, but does not bring all the qml niceties - and dependencies. Or an alternative, more native GUI, that communicates with the "backend" via the webapi. I think a simple cli can illustrate this concept well.

My goal would be just to have a small (<20Mb) package, without all the bells and whistles, that we can recommend to use in an environment where downloading >100Mb is a luxury.