Hi,
I’m glad if you enjoy NsCDE. 1024x768 is the smallest resolution which I had in mind when scalling things for compatibility and usability across devices which may be unknown to me, so 1366x768 should work really ok.
Also, nice to know it doesn’t have problems on Slackware. I didn’t tested on this veteran distribution.
About NS+CDE … yeah I’ve got a link from colleague, but didn’t bothered to login or sign up to answer. I respect NeXTStep, it is nice, but not really my cup of tea. Doesn’t have much in common with CDE or NsCDE of course.
Stalonetray: you don’t have to do anything with it. If you have applications that use tray icon, it will automatically dock in it (for example VLC, Pidgin, pnmixer, firewall-applet …). If you don’t see any of this, gor a longer time, you can probably disable stalonetray startup in ~/.NsCDE/NsCDE.conf (nscde_use_stalonetray 0).
NsCDE is my hobby, but I’m also using it at home machine and on work, I have never considered making some profit with it, but I really appreciate your good intention. In my country people say “consider you did it already”.
About resizing images: ImageMagick set of tools. You already have it as NsCDE dependency. See convert(1) … for example “convert -resize 1024 image.jpg small_image.png” … 1024 is the width, and height will be calculated automatically.
Good luck with Covid-19 … grow antibodies! 