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Comment by emillon | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why people focus so much on "default" desktop environments. No desktop is more supported than another one, as long as there is a package (and a maintainer! come join us, all hands are welcome) for it. This commit is from tasksel's git repository, which is used when you decide to install "tasks" from the debian installer.

Choosing to install a particular desktop environment when you want a "graphical environment" is only a matter of convenience : proposing GNOME from a CD install is getting harder because of the size of new versions. Several ideas were proposed : changing the default DE in tasksel, changing the compression scheme for .debs (using LZMA instead of bzip2), or even dropping CD installations IIRC (keeping just CD and USB netinstalls, and DVD installations).

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One problem with defaults is that if you put, say, a modern version of Unity on a live cd, and try running it in some system with a really crummy integrated GPU, you will have a completely unresponsive experience because hardware acceleration isn't on.

Starting with something light and making eye candy available as an option sounds better than having extreme eye candy (gnome3, kde, Unity) and having to endure extreme slowness to get to lxde or openbox.

Make both install-able and working and pick automatically at install time?

When running on old hardware offer something light (all the way down to text, say for mainframes).

This actually happens with the netinstall of Fedora, and I imagine you can do it with the netinstall of Debian as well.

That's true, but it's a completely different thing. This isn't about a LiveCD, it's about the regular installer.

I don't see why people are making a big deal out of the change. The net installer already has an option to choose between LXDE, Gnome, KDE, and XFCE. I'd suspect anybody installing Debian themselves and who has a preference would know how to change between them.

That said, it wouldn't hurt to make the option could be a little easier to find.

Having to endure extreme slowness? Why not: Ctrl-Alt-F1, log in, then apt-get install lxde? (or lubuntu-desktop depending on what you are using)

Yes. All you see are the windows of things you're working on, and a panel (or two). If you autohide the panel, then all you see is what you're working on.

After using lxde (lubuntu) for about six months, the Windows desktops and the fancier Linux desktops now look like the red light district with prostitutes on display in flashing light-lined windows.

I don't know why people focus so much on "default" desktop environments. No desktop is more supported than another one,

But in the long run, a default desktop will be more thoroughly tested than a non-default. This is less true for debian than ubuntu, but I'd guess there's still some effect.

In the end, the one that will be more tested is of course the with the most users (higher popcon in debian terms). Having a default value certainly will cause more installs, but there's no distribution-wide effort to make XFCE or Gnome more tested than KDE or ratpoison : every one is a first class citizen.

Gnome 2 had an unusually long run and it was only really used for less than a decade. So even optimistically, the long run doesn't matter past 9 years or so.

Then there are other packages which will never be less tested than a default because they have already been tested for a few years.

The problem I find with something like gnome, is that it pulls in a huge amount of dependencies, and it isn't always easy to cleanly remove it.

`sudo apt-get autoremove --purge gnome*`

As someone who recently installed GNOME on a Xubuntu system and then uninstalled it, I can say firsthand that that still leaves a bunch of cruft, does not cleanly remove all packages.

It's not GNOME's fault though -- it's an annoying issue with big metapackages. Same thing happened with XFCE on a stock Ubuntu install.

People are biased towards pre-installed setup. This might not be huge in Linux but in general they tend to use what's provided. Also it gets more attention and more finishing touch by developers.

>I don't know why people focus so much on "default" desktop environments. No desktop is more supported than another one, as long as there is a package

That's not true. The "default" gets much more attention from users, and most new users will use it.

In a project like Ubuntu, for example, the "default" gets more funding, more people working on it, including professionally and more tailored themes.

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