Debian: Change default desktop to xfce | Hacker News Reader

Debian: Change default desktop to xfce

anonscm.debian.org

218 pointsr0muald152 comments

I was genuinely surprised that the diff was so small. It's a sign of a a well written and factored system. In more average codebases big changes like that would likely require changes in multiple places and also cascade changes to related modules.

Finally someone who understands the beauty of this instead of "my favourite DE is ..."!

This, coupled with the detailed explanation and rationale for the change, the explicit deadline, seems to me like an exemplar of good practice for free software community projects. It is not surprising that this came at a time when Debian is also discussing init systems, and hopefully the same well-thought approach will work there too. And that matters not just for Debian but for all distros IMHO, because it sets a precedent of how you do these things without fucking up your userbase and/or your developers.

Indeed. It's a good example of how software should be built and set up.

Well, the change affected only configuration files, I would be scared if a change like this required a source change.

Well could you imagine if Microsoft or Apple tried to change their desktop environments?

Like Windows 95 where you could pick between Program Manager and Desktop at install?

Easy:

1. Edit registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

2. Change Shell to whatever exe you want.

Lots of people do this to run IE as the desktop shell and lock the entire machine down by simply setting the shell as "iexplore.exe -k www.mysite.com" and setting up some group policy items. One Kiosk set up.

You can even change the entire GUI stuff: http://litestep.info/

same here!

Absolutely. I'm an openbox guy, though I have used XFCE and see it as a more sensible choice for a lot of somewhere-between-here-and-gnome users; that said, this kind of support for minimalist desktop systems would be a huge step in, if not the "right" direction (because that's a religious war), at least one that introduces users to a whole lot of flexibility they didn't know they didn't have.

To be honest, I would be genuinely afraid to use distro where patch to switch default desktop environment is much bigger than that. In ideal world, changing defaults should be one line change.

"Hello to all the tech journalists out there. This is pretty boring. Why don't you write a story about monads instead?"

Brought a smile to my face.

Posting this from a Wheezy/non-free install on a recycled Thinkpad X60 with 1Gb of RAM. This laptop manufactured in December 2006 will run Gnome OK but there are issues about scrolling large documents in LibreOffice and general responsiveness that bring me back to XFCE.

Surely Jessie defaults at this stage are mainly for those testing the installer?

I finally switched to xfce because it does things how I want, rather than how the Gnome or Unity people think I should have them set up. Maybe those are better for end user type people, but... that's not me.

This is why I jumped back to kde

Yes! Switched back to KDE (Kubuntu + KDE 4.11 here) a few days ago. I'm really happy. I finally have a mature and stable system again. Unity was just to buggy for me (13.10) but KDE is really fast and stable. I don't want to sound like a shill here. I was happy using KDE 3.5 back in the day and hated all the KDE4 ideas... for anyone wondering if KDE is usable again I think it's the case (maybe it is for a few years longer - I did not bother to look).

However it took me a few hours to configure the system to my needs and adjust the often stupid (IMHO) KDE defaults to sane settings. But I could without problems.

Give KDE a try! XFCE / Xubuntu is to ugly and unflexible for my taste. KDE is also does not hog too much memory - without Semantic Desktop it's only about 400MB RSS (amd64) for the whole system after a clean boot. That still a lot but a little bit less than Unity and a little bit more than XFCE.

I've been a hardcore KDE fan since over a decade. Of late though, I am inclined to move fully to GNOME 3. I use KDE on my laptop and GNOME 3 on the work desktop. I find Gnome 3 much more pleasant to work with and it let's me forget about many details of doing things on the desktop. Once I got used to it, it allows me to switch tasks faster and with less focus/flow loss while doing so. It doesn't have a "minimise" button by default in GNOME 3 and at first this annoyed me but now I see that I never think of the concept of mimising something in my workflow. It's one less thing to think about.

I know there's a lot of hate for GNOME 3 floating around but I have tried it and I love it. I showed it to a lot of colleagues and most of them have switched to it too. I think in the next LTS release of Ubuntu, I'll switch my laptop to GNOME 3.

In the next LTS release of Ubuntu, you will get Unity and not GNOME3 by default. Unless of course you remove Unity and go with GNOME3.

There's a GNOME Remix that we must account for. It's what I have running on a few VMs at work and at home.

The GNOME Remix is hobbled by Canonicals decision to stick with older releases of GNOME and GTK. Ubuntu 14.04 will likely ship with GNOME 3.8 instead of 3.12. For various technical reasons they can't just put the newer version in a PPA.

The issue is that Kubuntu's default has a lot to desired compared to OpenSUSE's KDE polish or Arch Linux's vanilla KDE. I always found Kubuntu more work and less "useful."

Xfce is 4.x right now. I want them never to move to a version 5.

Rant: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/582674.html

All they have to do now is not fuck up. Xfce: please, just don't fuck up.

"When people combine the words "desktop" and "innovation", I reach for my revolver."

I love this quote. I don't understand why people are so obsessed with redesigning a thing that works well into a thing that clearly nobody wants EVER.

Even the big boys do this WINDOWS 8 COUGH COUGH.

> redesigning a thing that works well

I really dislike this recent trend we can see in Gnome, Unity, and Google even, but one would be blind to not see the reason behind: They all try to solve the touch issue. Desktops were designed for the mouse, and this do not translate well on touch screens.

One could argue there is a gap that cannot be bridged, but we should not complain that some people are trying to bridge the gap and create an interface that is working well on both screen+keyboard+mouse and touchscreens.

For all its vaunted touch-friendliness (or touchiness), the evidence is that it was a couple of years before they even in fact tested GNOME 3 on an actual touch screen: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3017371&cid=4083522... Is being able to unlock the screen a "core functionality"?

I have a laptop. I can't remember ever thinking "I want to rub my grubby fingers all over the screen". If I wanted to do that, I'd grab a tablet or smartphone.

Touch is a compromise. Touch screen devices are useful because they go where proper computers don't. I can look at my smartphone at the bus stop where I wouldn't pull my laptop out. I don't see the point in wasting huge amounts of time and creativity designing these silly hybrid OSes.

It's like adding a horse trap to the front of your horseless carriage.

> One could argue there is a gap that cannot be bridged

I'm going to make the argument. A mouse and your finger are both pointing devices; they compete directly with each other.

A mouse is an excellent pointing device, and your finger is a terrible, nearly-dysfunctional pointing device.

Redesigning your UI, built for a mouse, to be finger-compatible instead is essentially saying "the mouse worked too well. We're going to give you a huge functionality downgrade BECAUSE WE CAN."

Yes, we should complain that people are trying to bridge the gap. Devices you're meant to carry around and use at a moment's notice use fingers because nobody ever forgets to bring those with them.

But just because drinking lemon juice kept sailors from dying of scurvy, doesn't mean it's a good idea to tell everyone to drink it. Lemon juice is better than dying -- and if they're not dying, it's a very rare person who's willing to drink it at all.

Where's the movement to make word processors more Twitter-compatible? Where's the movement to have sleeping bag alcoves, instead of beds, in your home?

I feel the same way about the iOS 7 calendar. It actually angers me to use it. I feel like smashing my phone against the wall on occasions. For some reason the previous calendar never annoyed me once and it never got in my way.

But then someone came in with a new paradigm. "_everything_ that slightly represents a skeuomorphic design _must_ be redone." and then they proceeded to completely fuck it up.

The Ubuntu upfuckery is that they are hell bent on making everything touchscreen compatible. One interface to rule them all.

Good luck and don't come crying when users refuse to follow.

You're lucky that there's any desktop environment that does things how you want. I haven't found one yet, but xfce with compiz and a lot of customization gets close.

For me, I run XFCE with Xmonad as the WM. It's all sorts of awesome, letting me best use each of my screens. I've found it very customizable and awesome.

What are the things you're looking for in a desktop environment?

Basically what I want is Unity's task switcher (I know, everyone hates it, but for me it is almost exactly how I like it), KDE's system settings, and xfce's everything else (except Thunar; but using Nautilus under xfce is easy enough).

I'm exceedingly happy with my ratpoison, but fully expect others wouldn't be.

Openbox plus many many hours of customization has earned me a set-up that I'm pretty happy with.

It takes a while but if you have the time to think about every little piece and keybinding it's pretty fun.

YES. I often play around with different desktops (xmonad <3) but I always end up in XFCE.

In the past I end up in Gnome 2, but now XFCE is my all purpose desktop.

I don't really like KDE 4, Gnome 3 or Unity (hey it's my opnion, mmkay). XFCE is the big guy left. The others feel exotic, new or just not stable enough (like cinnamon). XFCE seems a perfect match for Debian.

If you always ended up in GNOME 2 (like I did), perhaps you should give MATE a try. It's stable and continues right where GNOME 2 left off.

Combine Mate with Compiz (you have to grab it from Sid though as there is not a maintainer anymore).

Flipping between windows should be a mindless gesture and that's what that a config of the above allows.

I've been using xfce since I started in on Ubuntu. KDE and Gnome were too fat, and lets not even bother with wasting breath insulting Unity.

The only thing I've ever enjoyed more than xfce is custom WM setups, but that's going pretty far down the "lean" route. If xfce can run smooth on a first gen 1.6ghz eeepc, it will be fine for anything else.

i use xfce + xmonad. they play together very nicely.

I switched to LXDE after years of XFCE. Seems faster and does everything I need well. Worth a look.

I switched to LXDE instead of XFCE from the impending Unity that Ubuntu was going to give me. XFCE had historically been my go-to lightweight, but when I tried it a couple years ago it "felt" a little heavy and a little slow compared to LXDE. Actually Lubuntu vs Xubuntu.

I may give XFCE a try again when I move upstream to Debian. That'll be sometime this year I think.

Agreed. LXDE is my favorite light desktop. I just hope that in the migration from GTK to qt, they manage to keep the memory footprint and CPU resource usage as low as it has always been.

I can honestly say that I'm generally very happy and productive with Gnome 3. It looks and feels way better than Unity.

With Gnome 3 I can launch, place, and switch all applications with a few keystrokes and without touching the mouse at all, all while "normal" people can still use the very same configuration. I like that it's basically just an unobstrusive shell to launch and switch applications.

People always complain that Linux desktops just mimic Windows 95, now that Gnome has done something entirely new (and good!), people complain that it's different to what they're used to.

>> People always complain that Linux desktops just mimic Windows 95, now that Gnome has done something entirely new (and good!) [..]

If by 'entirely new (and good)!' you mean 'just mimic the OS X desktop' (badly), then yes, Gnome is doing great :-/

Well I beg to differ. I really like the Gnome 3 Shell, and I think it's a mature and usable interface. Of course paradigm stealing is happening since 1984 Mac OS (or before), but there's enough to Gnome 3 to make it not just a bad copy of something else.

Of course there's some stuff that sucks badly, for me it's some changes in Nautilus' drag&drop and keybindings, they seem to just change stuff there for the cause of being different. And the crude notification space on the bottom of the screen is pretty unimaginative and annoying.

OK. So basically just what Unity does then?

Not trying to belittle your comment or anything, but had you not prefixed your comment "With Gnome 3 I can", I would just have assumed you just described Unity. Because Unity does all that very well too.

So what's different about it? What makes it better?

I haven't really used Unity apart from launching a terminal and a browser on someone else's desktop. Unity and Gnome 3 seem very similar, both visually and by paradigm. I guess Unity is a brainchild of Ubuntu's NIH attitude.

Personally as a Gnome 3 user, when having to use Unity i got annoyed because my muscle memory keystrokes didn't work as expected (hit win, type "term" hit return, hit win-uparrow, expect a fullscreen terminal), but there's no point in expecting Unity to behave exactly like Gnome 3, I'm sure a similar workflow exists in Unity.

> hit win, type "term" hit return, hit win-uparrow, expect a fullscreen terminal

Unity version: hit win, type "term" hit return, hit F11, expect a fullscreen terminal

Also: hit win, type "term", hit return, hit alt-space x, expect a fullscreen terminal.

Don't want to come across smug but in Awesome and many other tiling WM:

meta+Enter

That's it, your fullscreen terminal is there.

hmm, also in Windows 95.

That's blatantly not true. You have to press: ctrl+esc, up arrow, enter, c, m, d, enter, alt+m, enter (or something along those lines) And in the end I'm pretty sure the windows command prompt doesn't allow you to maximise it because it can't adapt to the changing line and row number.

Also how do you get Windows 95 to manage your X session? ;) Seriously though, we're all talking about Linux here.

edit: I understand your confusion now, I think you failed to realise that meta+enter also opens the said terminal

I think you failed to realise that meta+enter also opens the said terminal

ah yes, didn't know that. was referring to full-screening.

Ah, nope, that's maximised, not fullscreen. Try both to see the difference.

> Ubuntu's NIH attitude

GNOME is implementing their vision for the desktop.

Ubuntu is implementing their vision for the desktop.

What's wrong with that?

Nothing really. Let them to what they want with their resources.

I'd just say that with the current state of Unity and Gnome 3, it doesn't really make sense to have them both, since they're quite similar in look & feel. So I might suspect that right now Ubuntu's vision is to have something own they control. Which doesn't make sense to me but is their right.

Ctrl-Alt T, F11

Launch terminal, go fullscreen, much faster.

You are right about muscle memory. I hated Ubuntu until I forced myself to learn the shortcuts, now I love it.

Maximize is control-win-uparrow -- I'm not sure if you meant that or fullscreen.

I have to agree with this post. Gnome 3.1 is really great, and I feel they've finally moved away from the 95 look and feel.

I've been using XFCE on debian for ages. I just ran installs of two other Linuxes with Gnome 3 and KDE 4, just to check...and to be honest, I'm happy with XFCE.

I've been on XFCE on Debian since KDE 4 came out. Recently I had a fresh install and checked gnome out of curiosity and it turns out I'm too old-fashioned for this.

KDE4 came out a long time ago, back then 4.0 was derided as a beta-quality clusterfuck but it's come a long way.

This past weekend I installed KDE 4.10 on a FreeBSD 9.2 vm using the new "pkgng" tools. Completely painless. KDE 4.10 is very polished.

Gnome 3 is awful IMO. It's not NEARLY as bad as Unity, but I still prefer Xfce myself too.

I thought Gnome 3 had some potential, especially if I could hook shortcuts up to replace all the clicking. It seemed to be imitating OS X, which felt like a good thing[1].

However, I don't have time to figure out how to "fix" it for my personal needs, and I can't be bothered if it involves more than a single conf file I can save in a gist...and it's certainly not compelling enough to move me back from something as simple as XFCE.

[1] note: I don't use most features in OS X, but the dock and whatever "show me all the desktops" is called, I do heavily, as well as a keystroke launcher.

I've been using Xfce on everything since about 2010. It's my default on my Ubuntu and OpenBSD VMs/workstations.

Xfce promotes a good deal of minimalist motifs, which is nice. I found Gnome 2 and Unity quickly excessive with clutter.

To be honest I don't care too much about the default desktop, but I think this commit message is particularly well-written and leaves little room for the (inevitable?) flame-wars about the topic. The closing sentence got me laughing.

Why are CD images still so popular?

My last few computers have only included CD drives for the purpose of booting installers that are inconvenient to put on USB. USB drives, on the other hand, are quite universal.

Because they are write-once (more secure).

I doubt many people favor CDs over usb drives because they fear that somebody might rewrite the image on the media in the minutes between writing the image and actually sticking it in the other machine and using it.

In fact, it isn't even clear to me that CDs are favored in the first place. Everybody I know has been just using netinst from a usb stick for quite a while now... CDs are probably primarily used by people who want to give other people the install media, people who can't boot from USB on their computers, and people who still have a stack of CDs that they want to get rid of.

Can't I just be a luddite who has never done it any other way?

Well sure!

To be honest, the only reason I stopped using CDs is that for the past several years my computers haven't had optical drives (netbooks, now a chromebook). Otherwise I tend to be rather resistant to change.

"and people who still have a stack of CDs that they want to get rid of."

Ha! Yeah. I got a stack of 50 CDs several years ago, and the last 10 or so ... just didn't get used for anything. We eventually gave them to the younger teen for music school, 'cos the actual makes-money music industry still works with physical demo CDs. Some sort of proof-of-work thing, I think.

Debian's CD images are actually hybrid CD/DVD/USB images: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s03.html.en

It's been a feature of isolinux for a while now: http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc/isolinux#HYBRID_C...

When trying to transfer an ISO to a USB stick, I find

    dd if=<file> of=<device> bs=4M; sync

as per Debian wiki [1] works for me with Debian isos and recently a CentOS live CD image when installing on another laptop. Oddly enough, USB sticks prepared using unetbootin fail with Debian ISOs (boots but continually complains about not being able to find CD-ROM) but also works with CentOS based ISOs.

[1] http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb

Every single Debian USB image I've tried to flash with dd has failed in the last few years. I have to boot up a windows virtual machine and use LinuxLive USB Creator to create one.

It's odd as the RaspberryPi debian image works perfectly fine.

Strange.. I do it without problem at every install.

I'd love to see a cross browser app, one that worked on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux that just required to to drag and drop an image and write to USB.

Ubuntu's usb-creator-gtk works fine for me. I do agree it's disappointing you can't just dd it.

That's odd. It should be fine, but here are some things to check:

- Make sure that none of the filesystems on the USB stick are mounted before you begin. Otherwise, the filesystem drivers might corrupt something.

- Use a larger block size that's a power of 2 (e.g. bs=4096k). The default is 512 bytes, which is too small. This should just speed things up, but using writes that are smaller than the actual flash erase blocks can cause a lot of extra erases, and maybe your flash stick breaks when you do that.

- Run 'sync' after using dd, and wait for disk activity to finish. dd doesn't flush to disk by default.

- Don't use an amd64 image on a 32-bit machine. Don't use ia64 on a 64-bit PC.

- Try using synchronized I/O:

    sudo dd if=debian-7.2.0-i386-CD-1.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=4096k oflag=sync

Thanks, I'll come back and read this next time I do it. The first thing I checked was the bit length, though it could be the file system type or the synchronized io

Because they can be used on CDs, used directly by VMs, and also imaged to USB/flash drives with tools like UNetBootin. It's just a convenient disk image format.

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/#features

It might also be because that's the way debian-installer's written. I'd like to get it working with a copy of the CD filesystem on a drive - boot via UEFI

My problem with xfce and most other Linux desktops is that they look like a Windows desktop from the early 2000s. It's an aesthetic that I don't personally enjoy; I'm much more of a shiny/fancy user, which is why I like Aero, or to a lesser extent, Mac OS X.

I suppose that's part of why I don't bother with GUIs on *nix systems.

Look at Xubuntu. It looks nothing like older windows.

You can apply themes to xfce that make it look just as modern as anything else. Debian tend not to go in for applying sparkle to their default installs, so try not to judge based on their defaults.

Since we're talking about DEs, and not distributions, could you let us know what theme Xubuntu uses?

I don't think many of us have the commitment to install another distro just to try out an xfce skin... :(

LOL, sure, should have mentioned rather than just asserting and running away...

IIRC Xubuntu (or at least the last Xubuntu install I used) has 'greybird' as its default theme.

On debian you'll want to install the "murrine-themes" package to get this and a whole load of others. To change Xfce themes completely it seems you need to go into settings->Appearance and settings->Window Manager, which is a bit clunky.

I'm not going to say it's the most awesome thing in the world EVAR, but after years of Gnome 2 and 'clearlooks', it's refreshing.

Thanks!

Xfce behaves like I want it to. Cinnamon looked nice on Mint but had a habit of hogging all the CPU for no reason at times. Unity was a mess and made me ditch Ubuntu.

Xfce behaves the way I expect my desktop to, and the way I am used to. I prefer that over shiny.

> My problem with xfce and most other Linux desktops is that they look like a Windows desktop from the early 2000s. It's an aesthetic that I don't personally enjoy; I'm much more of a shiny/fancy user, which is why I like Aero, or to a lesser extent, Mac OS X.

Sounds like you might enjoy Elementary OS, or at least that's probably the closest that Linux gets to what you're describing.

GNOME and KDE are both pretty firmly in shiny/fancy territory, at least compared with xfce and the like.

KDE looks pretty flash.

Just my opinion - I think this is insane. I literally cannot believe a massive distro like Debian has decided to switch defaults to such an ugly and outdated DE when Gnome is doing such good work switching to Wayland so they can support more than just desktops. Meanwhile Xfce devs are all "X works fine so why switch to Wayland?" as if there aren't a million great reasons. This is the sort of decision that causes people to joke about how we'll never see the year of the Linux desktop.

Ugly and outdated? I use the theme from Xubuntu [1] and there's nothing outdated about it, besides not being adjusted for tablets.

[1] http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/199/e/d/xubuntu_13_04...

It uses X. That itself is outdated before I start talking about out of date design principles.

I personally don't like the black menu bar, I don't like the big childish icons, I don't like the slate gray gradient window box and I don't like the UI design's 2000s take on Finder. It's just not pretty in my opinion. And that does count to me, and probably the majority of end users too.

> It uses X. That itself is outdated before I start talking about out of date design principles.

All major window managers and desktop enivornments use X today. Some, such as KDE, Gnome and Enlightenment have begun work towards becoming Wayland compositors, and their underlying GUI libraries (Qt, GTK, and so on) towards supporting Wayland instead of X. However, you'll be hard pressed to find any significant number of them running on anything but X today.

I too want Wayland to succeed and take over for X, and when that day comes, XFCE should hopefully be ready for it. Complaining that XFCE uses X today, though, makes no sense.

> I personally don't like the black menu bar, I don't like the big childish icons, I don't like the slate gray gradient window box and I don't like the UI design's 2000s take on Finder. It's just not pretty in my opinion.

This, it seems to me, is just an expression of your personal taste. While that certainly matters do yourself, it doesn't really bring much to the discussion.

>It uses X

Disregarded everything you had to say there.

I don't want to start some design war and I am a fellow xfce user, but yeah, its not modern looking at all. It looks like a 1990s unix workstation. Nothing wrong with that, but lets not pretend that its eye-catching to a hypothetical average user.

For the geek minimalist who just wants a low-resource GUI environment, its very, very nice. I can see why Debian went with it.

I'd somehow mistakenly dismissed XFCE as being "too fiddly" years ago, but I've recently switched to it and I love it. It's like a saner, more configurable GNOME 2.6 with pleasant defaults.

Does anyone use the Debian default desktop? I always figure it to be a distro whose users prefer to customize. I personally tend to set it up with the netinst image, with no GUI, then install a WM and set up ~/.xsession manually..

The desktop is pretty much the only thing I bother to customise when installing a distro. (that and maybe partitions, if it's not in a VM.)

I'm running XFCE on a 4 years old laptop with 1 GB RAM. GNOME and KDE aren't even options here, but XFCE is beautiful, efficient, fast and never makes me feel the laptop is so old.

Yeah. I run old hardware and when I switched from Xfce to Openbox because "it's lighter" I almost fell out of my chair when I realized my Openbox system was using twice the resources. Of course it was my fault and I changed it up (no more compositing!) but I gained a lot of respect for Xfce in that process.

Also when building a DE from scratch it's nice to know that any of the Xfce pieces will 'just work'.

If you guys like Debian and want a beatiful, fast DE and WM try Crunchbang. Used to be an Ubuntu and Mint guy. Even tried Xubuntu. I settled on Crunchbang, based on openbox, mainly because it is easy to configure, sensible out of the box and is even faster than XFCE distributions.

Here's a screenshot with WebStorm, gVim and Terminator which can split panes (although I use tmux most of the time).

http://imgur.com/nL4VGH4

That's my custom theme. The default theme is beautiful too.

Make it less bloody ugly. I was horrified how awful Xfce looked in Wheezy compared to Ubuntu Quantal. So wish Xfce would upstream the Xubuntu changes.

It was the switch to Gnome3 that drove me to CentOS...although I'm not sure xfce would be enough to make me want to go back.

Well there's nothing stopping you from using any desktop environment you want on pretty much any distro, this is just about the default choice on a new installation.

* The state of accessability support, particularly for the blind.

it's kind of sad, Gnome was reputed for it's accessibility support

I think what is trying to be said is that they have to evaluate accessibility support for both Xfce and Gnome3 before finalizing this decision. Gnome is (or was?) reputed for this as you say, and must be part of the decision to switch away.

Why not LXDE? I've been putting that on my debian VM's when I need a GUI, it seems reasonable.

In my experience, XFCE has been prettier (for me at least, using the Xubuntu theme).

I can't speak for Debian, but for my money, XFCE is more integrated, LXDE isn't. SSH agents aren't installed, for example, and aren't trivial to manually install. Looking for LXDE help has you palmed off to Openbox as often as not. I think LXDE looks better - XFCE looks coarse and ungainly, but there is better integration. Still not perfect, but if it's moved to be the debian default, there will be more eyes on it.

Is the XFCE/xubuntu community more active? I suppose that plays a big role on how much ongoing development activity there is...

The Xfce forum is helpful, and they do happily answer Xubuntu questions. (Frequently the answer is "yeah, pull that in from GNOME" or "that hasn't been written yet, please do!" but that's fair enough in many cases ;-)

You might as well use a standalone window manager + various apps if you need something more "lightweight" than xfce.

I've been a huge fan of LXDE ever since I went to make the clock show seconds, and it literally told me to look up man 3 strftime. THAT is how you get rid of non-serious users.

This is awesome and I hope XFCE remains the default. I will love and use debian forever, either way.

xfce4 is a good choice for Debian it is lightweight and easy to use. KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now, but it's too resource hungry to be the default Debian environment, imho.

"KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now"

I strongly dissagree.

I really like Cinnamon, but it's too unstable outside of Mint.

Even in Mint it seems to hog the cpu for no reason at times.

""KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now" I strongly dissagree." I strongly disagree with you. KDE is not perfect but at least gives freedom to customize it a lot, and without need to swing in config files.

Configurability doesn't make it better, in the contrary, it has to many vane options to my taste.

But at least, configuration makes you free. KDE don't make you slave of his "vision" tm

I've never had that "vision" problem with other desktops, what you say is just your own opinión, nothing else.

I remember when I tried GNOME 3 in Debian wheezy. I could not work out how to do anything at all. Literally, the only button to click on was the one to exit. So I did.

And I remember the first time I used GNOME 3, it was a great experience, I pressed the Windows key and a few letters and I could launch the program I wanted, I could press the winkey again and have an overview of my openned Windows, I could press ctrl+shif+arrow up or down and I could switch from one virtual desktop to another, I could press alt + the key above tab and I could switch betwen the Windows of the same applications, there was barely the need to use the mouse or navigate in menus to click something, It was an awesome, intuitive and productive experience, cause the desktop was getting out of my way, that was my first experience with GNOME 3.

It's worth bringing up Jamie Zawinski's post on the subject of GNOME (and this was the 1.x-2.x transition!), "The CADT Model": http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

"It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?"

XFCE is pretty nice. Still not as fast and using as low resources as LXDE, but it's still much better than Gnome 3-based DE's.

I tried debian 7.2 default gnome. It feels like bloody Windows Vista. Switched back to the beloved Xfce.

Debian, you are wasting time with that.. thing.

I tried Debian Gnome 3 in wheezy.

I decided "right, this is the new user-friendly desktop. Let's see how I go."

I literally couldn't find anything to click on to make it work. Literally nothing. The only button I could find was how to switch it off.

'I recommend this Dusk Till Dawn quote to desktop designers: "Are you such a loser, you can't tell when you've won?".'

I can't remember for sure, but I think I was lost at first too. Then I discovered the windows key, and never looked back. I love getting most things done without touching the mouse. Though I did have to install a panel for when I work with more than a few instances of the same program at once (at which point alt tab can sometimes not allow me to differentiate between the instances as fast as I'd like).

I still think they should pop up a short tutorial when you first use it.

Yeah. I thought "ok, this is supposed to be user-obvious. Let's see what I can do."

I wonder how that Windows key thing works out for their hypothetical tablet users.

With the home key instead of the window key, it is a no brainer.

Can you unlock the screen without a physical keyboard yet?

Yes, there is a virtual keyboard in the unlock screen.

Does it have tilde yet? http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3017371&cid=4083522...

I don't know that yet, I'll tell you when I get to my Linux box =).

On most build systems, it's enough to change a default in one place, and not the same default in two different places.

4 locations, if you count the commit. 1 place actually changes it, the rest are documentation.

/debian/changelog is a highly formalized free form-ish text file explaining what changed since the last .deb package. You could put lorem ipsum in there and the package wouldn't care although it would annoy people.

/debian/control is a list of recommends (why not a "depend"?) I believe this is a cosmetic change only ( 1 or 0 or 0 or 0 logically equals the result of 0 or 1 or 0 or 0, that type of thing )

(whoops edited to note that its some tasksel thing so its more than cosmetic, but for joe average doin all the defaults what matters will be the template file...)

/debian/templates is the sort of free form yet structured debconf question file that actually does the task selection.

Note that default dependency takes the first hit, i.e. A or B selects A by default, whereas B or A selects B, so the ordering in the control file does matter.

Debian's jessie GNOME packages were also woefully out of date until the past 2 weeks. You can finally run GNOME 3.8 which was released over 7 months ago. At this rate they'll always been at least 1 stable version behind and probably end up at 2 behind by the time jessie is frozen next year.

It is not like gnome is adding any new functionality on the latest ones.

I need a rather unusual setup for work. I use focus-follow-mouse. But clicks do not raise windows unless i'm also holding the move window modifier (flag key).

I was unable to do that simple setting with gnome3 for years and always reverted back to XFCE or gnome2.

But now, since a couple months ago, with the effort from the community redoing their work via the extension gnome site, i can finally have that setup on gnome 3. even on the "old" versions that debian uses (i run untainted debian7). So i completely fail to see your point. Even more so as latest gnomes broke some extensions, screwing the community over yet again. Had debian be on the bleeding edge i'd probably be waiting for some extensions to be ported yet again.

gnome is a project that teaches that upgrading blindly is dumb.

It's worse than that. Gnome-shell (probably the most visible part of Gnome) is still at 3.4 in Jessie. It just hit Sid last week or something.

That said, I've used Gnome 3 since it was still in development and grew to love it. After using 3.8 (on Ubuntu Gnome 13.10), I think 3.8's improvements over 3.6 are pretty significant. It feels lighter, faster, smoother overall. The newly redesigned apps (e.g. evince) feel extremely well designed too.

Same here. I'm a big fan of Gnome Shell nowadays. Simple, fast, beautiful. No more hours of tweaking my default install of $FAVORITE_DISTRO until it's usable. Love it.

That's the way debian works, to make sure changes are thoroughly tested. It probably doesn't work for gnome 3, as it gets gradually more usable over the years.

Speaking of gnome in debian, I have managed to make gnome 3 tolerable with a couple of changes, one to disable the global mac-style menu, and an extension to completely hide the top and bottom bars, called "Panel Settings".

One thing I quite like is the speed at which I can launch apps with gnome 3 and an ssd, with the first few letters of an apps name.

Although I have just noticed my gedit preferences menu item has disappeared, because the gnome menu that comes up next to 'activities' isn't visible when I hide the panel... Maybe it is time to check out xcfe again, or more likely, tweak my gnome config further to disable that menu placement as well. I'm attached to gnome, I think, because it does things like powering down external drives via the "file manager", (whatever thats called now), which xcfe didn't do when I tried it last year.

Incredible closing sentence.

At first I thought this said "Change default desktop to xkcd"

Too bad they didnt switch to windowlab. Now that is a lightweight window manager. Amiga style window management!

Unity and Gnome3 drove me to xubuntu. Really happy I made the switch.

Unity and Gnome3 drove me to lubuntu. Really happy I made the switch.

And I've heard the same or similar from many other people.

Who cares?

go talk about nomads.

Why click on the thread if you don't care?

must... resist... urge to troll... (edited for stupidity)

Ok, I kid, I kid... :)

But seriously, I'm thinking of switching back to testing from Ubuntu, if stuff doesn't break too often.

Is anyone here using testing lately, and did it seem fairly solid for daily desktop use?

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