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Well I guess I will have to transition to another DE in the future. I'm curious which DEs people are using with Debian.

zxzax 5y ago
Why not join up with some other Cinnamon users in Debian, and share some of the responsibility of maintaining the packages?
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  I understand this is a common suggestion in the developer world, but I think it is self evident that doing so takes a fair bit of time. The parent said they’ll just have to switch, which I expect is much easier than packaging a DE yourself or even sharing responsibility.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    Does it? I'd imagine you could collaborate with the Mint developers, most of the hard work in packaging seems to be done there already.
    - suby 5y ago
      There is specifically a version of Linux Mint Cinnamon which is based on Debian and not Ubuntu https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php Still though, I have to imagine there is a lot of work / knowledge required to maintain Cinnamon on Debian proper.
    - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
      But we know nothing about the person who said they will switch DE’s. We don’t know if spending time collaborating with Mint developers is a reasonable suggestion for them. I just want folks to realize that while recruitment is important, not every single Linux user should be expected to code for Linux. For example I’m a heavy Linux user but I’ve got my hands full maintaining my own open source robotics projects. I do not have time to take on something like this. I hope we can be understanding when people don’t have time for this kind of thing.
severine 5y ago
FWIW, there's a lot of Debian users in the Xfce forums.
superkuh 5y ago
MATE on Debian provides most of the decent "modern" gnome2 experience it always has. There are some problems with file chooser dialogs and the like due to feature removals in the underlying GNOME gtk3 libs but overall it's very usable.
- zxzax 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, which are the relevant features that were removed from GTK3? It should be possible to revive them in a separate library if they really are needed.
  - superkuh 5y ago
    The ability to toggle gsettings for location-mode from path-bar (those button folder) defaults to filename-entry (the location bar you type in) is what really bothers me. It means I can't paste filepaths into a just opened File dialog (it errors out unless you first type ctrl-l, ., `, or /). Additionally, the old type-ahead complete was removed from filename-entry. Arch at least has a patch set to put this back, but the location-mode thing is resistant to fixing. I changed the default initialization with a simple patch to gtkfilechooserwidget.c but it only works for the first time I File->Open in a gtk3 application. The second reverts back to pathbar.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      I don't think they will add settings back for that, but someone should be able to create an external file chooser that behaves differently.
    - stuaxo 5y ago
      Being able to copy / paste file paths is a feature that should probably exist, I'd imagine that would be accepted as a feature request.
      - zxzax 5y ago
        It won't happen in GTK3, that's feature frozen. Maybe someone could implement it in GTK4?
rscho 5y ago
Xfce. It's really very good. If you're not too much into aesthetics.
- guest_hacker 5y ago
  +1 Xfce is also very easy to customize out of the box. I customized my environment using the defaults that are preinstalled and I prefer it's looks to windows.
- LoveMortuus 5y ago
  I personally really like Xfce, but my philosophy has always been function over form, meaning I don't mind if it looks like it's from the last millennium as long as it doesn't hinder the performance of my device (Acer Aspire one, running Intel Atom). Interesting thing is that you can use the same philosophy in everyday life.
- Nursie 5y ago
  Xfce is fantastic. I made the switch when gnome 3 happened and have never looked back. It’s themeable enough for me - xubuntu usually looks pretty good, you can get the themes on Debian easily enough. It’s featureful enough, while still being relatively lightweight. But the best thing about it? It’s not opinionated. You can decide what goes on your bars/panels, where they go at what size etc.
symlinkk 5y ago
Just use GNOME, it’s developed by professionals and it shows.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  IMO GNOME is too tablet-oriented. I don't like it, this kind of UI is foreign on desktop. They waste an entire top bar. Top bar is not compatible with tabbed applications (mainly browsers). Application launcher screen is absolutely weird for desktop, it reminds me of Windows 8.
  - trotFunky 5y ago
    The thing is, you can change a lot of those things to match what you want. You can toggle the application menu, which works more like the windows menu. You can use something like dash-to-panel [0] to make the top bar into something useful. I know that in Firefox you can disable the window bar to make it look a lot cleaner with a top bar. Here is a screenshot of how my GNOME looks [1]. I don't have the application menu because I use an app launcher, so it doesn't bother me that much. That's an investment you have to make if you want it to look like you want to. Maybe you just want to have a DE that works for you without tweaking it, which I understand. But I'm pretty sure you could make a GNOME desktop you like given the time. Having tested multiple desktop environment and window managers, it's pretty great having such a diverse pool of choices : you can really ditch GNOME completely if you don't like it. [0] : https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel#features https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel#features [1] : https://i.imgur.com/NRegvAo.png https://i.imgur.com/NRegvAo.png (The orange on the left is me failing to crop my left monitor correctly)
    - eqvinox 5y ago
      The problem isn't that you can't configure GNOME to behave to your preferences. The problem is that GNOME makes it hard to do so, and that's a philosophical decision the project made. If I'm about to spend time customizing my DE to match my preferences and habits, I'd much rather spend the time on something that is made to be customizable.
gkya 5y ago
There's Linux Mint Debian Edition, basically Linux Mint you know but based on Debian, with some tiny quirks. It's maintained by Linux Mint folk themselves, who are the makers of Cinnamon itself.
- chuckdotis 5y ago
  I've been using LMDE for about a year and a half and it's been great. Originally discovered it when I was having issues trying to update to the latest version of Cinnamon on Debian 9. I have it highly customized compared to what comes out of the box. I've tried XFCE, MATE, and Gnome, but I just feel at home with Cinnamon. What's nice about LMDE is that the Cinnamon DE is always up-to-date compared to the version that's available on Debian 10.
toastal 5y ago
When I was on Debian I was pretty satisfied with Openbox + XFCE panel (and I guess buy in piecemeal other XFCE bits as need) wishing came from the Crunchbang days. It was pretty lightweight and low-maintenance. With Wayland finally taking off (color management be damned sad), maybe you could give Sway, the Rust tiling manager, a go. Debian has a page for it https://wiki.debian.org/sway https://wiki.debian.org/sway
- matt-snider 5y ago
  Sway isn't written in Rust, all C as far as I know. It's really great though! Highly recommend it if you're looking for a minimalistic and very practical window manager.
  - toastal 5y ago
    Oh, I'm sorry. I've totally wrong for a while then. Yes, written in C, 97.5% C. https://github.com/swaywm/sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway
goodpoint 5y ago
i3/sway are not the most popular but well liked.
- eqvinox 5y ago
  That's a pretty extreme break in DE philosophy, coming from Cinnamon… The closest thing is probably indeed KDE, which the Debian Cinnamon maintainer switched to as they say in the post…
KozmoNau7 5y ago
Debian, Gentoo, Arch, openSUSE, I've been on KDE since Gnome 2 came out and it messed up a lot of the things I liked in Gnome 1. KDE 4 was a low point, at least the first releases were buggy and didn't feel nearly as good as 3, but 5 has been absolute smooth sailing. It's surprisingly light and nimble, I use it on my Thinkpad X220i and it runs great, better than Cinnamon on Mint did when I tried that out. There seems to be a lot of friction against giving KDE a go, and I just don't understand it.
- Santosh83 5y ago
  > There seems to be a lot of friction against giving KDE a go, and I just don't understand it. It's called NIH syndrome.
- eqvinox 5y ago
  I do understand the friction against KDE — it's C++, which used to mean huge ass programs and compile times, it uses Qt which keeps having… "second thoughts" on its license, and it used to be slow as fuck 15 years ago. Only the Qt thing is current, but memory is long on these things and a lot of people formed their opinions a decade ago. First impressions and whatnot.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    If KDE binaries were huge, that would be a consequence of KDE design choices, not of being in C++. Most likely, though, the definition of "huge" has anyway since grown past the size of KDE programs, and Gnome sizes probably have caught up to KDE's. I have not tried KDE in this decade, or the last. The article makes me curious. But Qubes is an Xfce desktop, and I am stuck there for the time being. It has been OK. Qubes desktop can't use a GPU anyway. If Qt goes proprietary, it will fork without drama.
    - Santosh83 5y ago
      I have used both KDE and GNOME during their 1.x and 2.x days, and even the beginning of 3.x days and KDE was never outrageously bloated compared to GNOME. The difference IME was always 10-15% more RAM use. And this was understandable since KDE was a much more full featured desktop with far more knobs to tweak and many more inbuilt applications compared to GNOME. I don't know what the situation is these days though but anecdotally it seems GNOME has now become the "bloated" desktop, thanks to Javascript in the shell.
dralley 5y ago
You could always switch distro, instead
ckcheng 5y ago
LXQt. Lightweight. Gets out of the way. Functional. I'm not terribly into aesthetics.
tytso 5y ago
I'm currently using KDE Plasma. I used to use XFCE, but it appeared that XFCE was having trouble getting enough developers such their release cycle seemed to be very slow, and in particular, at the time there was no indication that Wayland support was going to happen. I have no particular interest in Wayland on its own merits, but given that the X server support seems to also be not particularly sustainable in the long term[1], it seems like the rest of the world seems to be converging on Wayland, for better or for worse. [1] https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server... So given that GNOME is unacceptable to me (it doesn't support 2-D workspaces as a core feature, and extensions which support 2-D workspaces regularly break because the extensions API is not stable), and while I'm very happy with Xfce, but I was concerned about its long-term maintainability since it's tied to X, and its developer community's ability to move to Wayland seemed questionable, I decided to give KDE a try. To my surprise (I go back long enough to the days when KDE was highly opinionated and GNOME was the DE that had a lot more flexibility), KDE had support for everything that I needed (which is not a lot; I just want a decent, configurable window manager, and a decent terminal) and so spent the investment to move over to KDE. I see that the Xfce folks are now starting to think about adding Wayland support, and that's great. My main priorities is that I not be left high and dry when there is a major release, and whether I get messed up because GNOME has broken some extension which I depend upon, or some future desktop hardware no longer works with xfree86, and only Wayland, it looked like KDE was the best bet for me as a user who just wants a window manager, decent terminal support, and a 2-D workspace. You'd think that is a simple ask, but unfortunately, these days, it's not something I can count upon --- but KDE seemed to be my best bet.
cfgghsj 5y ago
Mate luddite here checking in. It hasn't changed since 2009.
SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
KDE here. It's an excellent environment with a great selection of its own software.

Why not join up with some other Cinnamon users in Debian, and share some of the responsibility of maintaining the packages?

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
I understand this is a common suggestion in the developer world, but I think it is self evident that doing so takes a fair bit of time. The parent said they’ll just have to switch, which I expect is much easier than packaging a DE yourself or even sharing responsibility.
- zxzax 5y ago
  Does it? I'd imagine you could collaborate with the Mint developers, most of the hard work in packaging seems to be done there already.
  - suby 5y ago
    There is specifically a version of Linux Mint Cinnamon which is based on Debian and not Ubuntu https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php Still though, I have to imagine there is a lot of work / knowledge required to maintain Cinnamon on Debian proper.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    But we know nothing about the person who said they will switch DE’s. We don’t know if spending time collaborating with Mint developers is a reasonable suggestion for them. I just want folks to realize that while recruitment is important, not every single Linux user should be expected to code for Linux. For example I’m a heavy Linux user but I’ve got my hands full maintaining my own open source robotics projects. I do not have time to take on something like this. I hope we can be understanding when people don’t have time for this kind of thing.

severine 5y ago

FWIW, there's a lot of Debian users in the Xfce forums.

superkuh 5y ago

MATE on Debian provides most of the decent "modern" gnome2 experience it always has. There are some problems with file chooser dialogs and the like due to feature removals in the underlying GNOME gtk3 libs but overall it's very usable.

zxzax 5y ago
Out of curiosity, which are the relevant features that were removed from GTK3? It should be possible to revive them in a separate library if they really are needed.
- superkuh 5y ago
  The ability to toggle gsettings for location-mode from path-bar (those button folder) defaults to filename-entry (the location bar you type in) is what really bothers me. It means I can't paste filepaths into a just opened File dialog (it errors out unless you first type ctrl-l, ., `, or /). Additionally, the old type-ahead complete was removed from filename-entry. Arch at least has a patch set to put this back, but the location-mode thing is resistant to fixing. I changed the default initialization with a simple patch to gtkfilechooserwidget.c but it only works for the first time I File->Open in a gtk3 application. The second reverts back to pathbar.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    I don't think they will add settings back for that, but someone should be able to create an external file chooser that behaves differently.
  - stuaxo 5y ago
    Being able to copy / paste file paths is a feature that should probably exist, I'd imagine that would be accepted as a feature request.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      It won't happen in GTK3, that's feature frozen. Maybe someone could implement it in GTK4?

rscho 5y ago

Xfce. It's really very good. If you're not too much into aesthetics.

guest_hacker 5y ago
+1 Xfce is also very easy to customize out of the box. I customized my environment using the defaults that are preinstalled and I prefer it's looks to windows.
LoveMortuus 5y ago
I personally really like Xfce, but my philosophy has always been function over form, meaning I don't mind if it looks like it's from the last millennium as long as it doesn't hinder the performance of my device (Acer Aspire one, running Intel Atom). Interesting thing is that you can use the same philosophy in everyday life.
Nursie 5y ago
Xfce is fantastic. I made the switch when gnome 3 happened and have never looked back. It’s themeable enough for me - xubuntu usually looks pretty good, you can get the themes on Debian easily enough. It’s featureful enough, while still being relatively lightweight. But the best thing about it? It’s not opinionated. You can decide what goes on your bars/panels, where they go at what size etc.

symlinkk 5y ago

Just use GNOME, it’s developed by professionals and it shows.

vbezhenar 5y ago
IMO GNOME is too tablet-oriented. I don't like it, this kind of UI is foreign on desktop. They waste an entire top bar. Top bar is not compatible with tabbed applications (mainly browsers). Application launcher screen is absolutely weird for desktop, it reminds me of Windows 8.
- trotFunky 5y ago
  The thing is, you can change a lot of those things to match what you want. You can toggle the application menu, which works more like the windows menu. You can use something like dash-to-panel [0] to make the top bar into something useful. I know that in Firefox you can disable the window bar to make it look a lot cleaner with a top bar. Here is a screenshot of how my GNOME looks [1]. I don't have the application menu because I use an app launcher, so it doesn't bother me that much. That's an investment you have to make if you want it to look like you want to. Maybe you just want to have a DE that works for you without tweaking it, which I understand. But I'm pretty sure you could make a GNOME desktop you like given the time. Having tested multiple desktop environment and window managers, it's pretty great having such a diverse pool of choices : you can really ditch GNOME completely if you don't like it. [0] : https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel#features https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel#features [1] : https://i.imgur.com/NRegvAo.png https://i.imgur.com/NRegvAo.png (The orange on the left is me failing to crop my left monitor correctly)
  - eqvinox 5y ago
    The problem isn't that you can't configure GNOME to behave to your preferences. The problem is that GNOME makes it hard to do so, and that's a philosophical decision the project made. If I'm about to spend time customizing my DE to match my preferences and habits, I'd much rather spend the time on something that is made to be customizable.

gkya 5y ago

There's Linux Mint Debian Edition, basically Linux Mint you know but based on Debian, with some tiny quirks. It's maintained by Linux Mint folk themselves, who are the makers of Cinnamon itself.

chuckdotis 5y ago
I've been using LMDE for about a year and a half and it's been great. Originally discovered it when I was having issues trying to update to the latest version of Cinnamon on Debian 9. I have it highly customized compared to what comes out of the box. I've tried XFCE, MATE, and Gnome, but I just feel at home with Cinnamon. What's nice about LMDE is that the Cinnamon DE is always up-to-date compared to the version that's available on Debian 10.

toastal 5y ago

When I was on Debian I was pretty satisfied with Openbox + XFCE panel (and I guess buy in piecemeal other XFCE bits as need) wishing came from the Crunchbang days. It was pretty lightweight and low-maintenance. With Wayland finally taking off (color management be damned sad), maybe you could give Sway, the Rust tiling manager, a go. Debian has a page for it https://wiki.debian.org/sway https://wiki.debian.org/sway

matt-snider 5y ago
Sway isn't written in Rust, all C as far as I know. It's really great though! Highly recommend it if you're looking for a minimalistic and very practical window manager.
- toastal 5y ago
  Oh, I'm sorry. I've totally wrong for a while then. Yes, written in C, 97.5% C. https://github.com/swaywm/sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway

goodpoint 5y ago

i3/sway are not the most popular but well liked.

eqvinox 5y ago
That's a pretty extreme break in DE philosophy, coming from Cinnamon… The closest thing is probably indeed KDE, which the Debian Cinnamon maintainer switched to as they say in the post…

KozmoNau7 5y ago

Debian, Gentoo, Arch, openSUSE, I've been on KDE since Gnome 2 came out and it messed up a lot of the things I liked in Gnome 1. KDE 4 was a low point, at least the first releases were buggy and didn't feel nearly as good as 3, but 5 has been absolute smooth sailing. It's surprisingly light and nimble, I use it on my Thinkpad X220i and it runs great, better than Cinnamon on Mint did when I tried that out. There seems to be a lot of friction against giving KDE a go, and I just don't understand it.

Santosh83 5y ago
> There seems to be a lot of friction against giving KDE a go, and I just don't understand it. It's called NIH syndrome.
eqvinox 5y ago
I do understand the friction against KDE — it's C++, which used to mean huge ass programs and compile times, it uses Qt which keeps having… "second thoughts" on its license, and it used to be slow as fuck 15 years ago. Only the Qt thing is current, but memory is long on these things and a lot of people formed their opinions a decade ago. First impressions and whatnot.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  If KDE binaries were huge, that would be a consequence of KDE design choices, not of being in C++. Most likely, though, the definition of "huge" has anyway since grown past the size of KDE programs, and Gnome sizes probably have caught up to KDE's. I have not tried KDE in this decade, or the last. The article makes me curious. But Qubes is an Xfce desktop, and I am stuck there for the time being. It has been OK. Qubes desktop can't use a GPU anyway. If Qt goes proprietary, it will fork without drama.
  - Santosh83 5y ago
    I have used both KDE and GNOME during their 1.x and 2.x days, and even the beginning of 3.x days and KDE was never outrageously bloated compared to GNOME. The difference IME was always 10-15% more RAM use. And this was understandable since KDE was a much more full featured desktop with far more knobs to tweak and many more inbuilt applications compared to GNOME. I don't know what the situation is these days though but anecdotally it seems GNOME has now become the "bloated" desktop, thanks to Javascript in the shell.

dralley 5y ago

You could always switch distro, instead

ckcheng 5y ago

LXQt. Lightweight. Gets out of the way. Functional. I'm not terribly into aesthetics.

tytso 5y ago

I'm currently using KDE Plasma. I used to use XFCE, but it appeared that XFCE was having trouble getting enough developers such their release cycle seemed to be very slow, and in particular, at the time there was no indication that Wayland support was going to happen. I have no particular interest in Wayland on its own merits, but given that the X server support seems to also be not particularly sustainable in the long term[1], it seems like the rest of the world seems to be converging on Wayland, for better or for worse. [1] https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server... So given that GNOME is unacceptable to me (it doesn't support 2-D workspaces as a core feature, and extensions which support 2-D workspaces regularly break because the extensions API is not stable), and while I'm very happy with Xfce, but I was concerned about its long-term maintainability since it's tied to X, and its developer community's ability to move to Wayland seemed questionable, I decided to give KDE a try. To my surprise (I go back long enough to the days when KDE was highly opinionated and GNOME was the DE that had a lot more flexibility), KDE had support for everything that I needed (which is not a lot; I just want a decent, configurable window manager, and a decent terminal) and so spent the investment to move over to KDE. I see that the Xfce folks are now starting to think about adding Wayland support, and that's great. My main priorities is that I not be left high and dry when there is a major release, and whether I get messed up because GNOME has broken some extension which I depend upon, or some future desktop hardware no longer works with xfree86, and only Wayland, it looked like KDE was the best bet for me as a user who just wants a window manager, decent terminal support, and a 2-D workspace. You'd think that is a simple ask, but unfortunately, these days, it's not something I can count upon --- but KDE seemed to be my best bet.

cfgghsj 5y ago

Mate luddite here checking in. It hasn't changed since 2009.

SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago

KDE here. It's an excellent environment with a great selection of its own software.