16 ms·

Debian: Change default desktop to xfce

218 points by r0muald 13y ago

r0muald 13y ago
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.
- Filligree 13y ago
  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.
  - jafaku 13y ago
    Because they are write-once (more secure).
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      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.
      - arielweisberg 13y ago
        Can't I just be a luddite who has never done it any other way?
        jlgreco 13y ago
        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.
      - davidgerard 13y ago
        "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.
  - dlitz 13y ago
    Debian's CD images are actually hybrid CD/DVD/USB images: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s03.html.en 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_CD-ROM.2FHARD_DISK_MODE http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc/isolinux#HYBRID_C...
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      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 http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb
    - pippy 13y ago
      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.
      - a-l-c-o 13y ago
        Strange.. I do it without problem at every install.
        pippy 13y ago
        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.
      - lukeschlather 13y ago
        Ubuntu's usb-creator-gtk works fine for me. I do agree it's disappointing you can't just dd it.
  - jlarocco 13y ago
    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 http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/#features
  - voltagex_ 13y ago
    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
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
lucasnemeth 13y ago
Incredible closing sentence.
staz 13y ago
* The state of accessability support, particularly for the blind. it's kind of sad, Gnome was reputed for it's accessibility support
- varikin 13y ago
  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.
tehwalrus 13y ago
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.
- IsTom 13y ago
  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.
  - ihsw 13y ago
    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.
    - darkandbrooding 13y ago
      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.
  - el_duderino 13y ago
    Gnome 3 is awful IMO. It's not NEARLY as bad as Unity, but I still prefer Xfce myself too.
    - tehwalrus 13y ago
      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.
bjourne 13y ago
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.
- r0muald 13y ago
  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.
  - bloodorange 13y ago
    Indeed. It's a good example of how software should be built and set up.
- Aldo_MX 13y ago
  Well, the change affected only configuration files, I would be scared if a change like this required a source change.
  - asperous 13y ago
    Well could you imagine if Microsoft or Apple tried to change their desktop environments?
    - Aldo_MX 13y ago
      Like Windows 95 where you could pick between Program Manager and Desktop at install?
    - 13y ago
txutxu 13y ago
On most build systems, it's enough to change a default in one place, and not the same default in two different places.
- VLM 13y ago
  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.
  - claudius 13y ago
    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.
keithpeter 13y ago
"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?
qwerta 13y ago
Who cares?
- niuzeta 13y ago
  go talk about nomads.
- alextingle 13y ago
  Why click on the thread if you don't care?
adestefan 13y ago
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.
- gcb0 13y ago
  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.
- abenga 13y ago
  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.
  - tvst 13y ago
    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.
- kristianp 13y ago
  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.
caycep 13y ago
Why not LXDE? I've been putting that on my debian VM's when I need a GUI, it seems reasonable.
- pwnna 13y ago
  In my experience, XFCE has been prettier (for me at least, using the Xubuntu theme).
- vacri 13y ago
  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.
  - caycep 13y ago
    Is the XFCE/xubuntu community more active? I suppose that plays a big role on how much ongoing development activity there is...
    - davidgerard 13y ago
      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 ;-)
- anaphor 13y ago
  You might as well use a standalone window manager + various apps if you need something more "lightweight" than xfce.
- davidgerard 13y ago
  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.
asveikau 13y ago
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..
- tehwalrus 13y ago
  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.)
talles 13y ago
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.
- Hinrik 13y ago
  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.
  - iluvuspartacus 13y ago
    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.
- fein 13y ago
  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.
- zem 13y ago
  i use xfce + xmonad. they play together very nicely.
- nawitus 13y ago
  I switched to LXDE after years of XFCE. Seems faster and does everything I need well. Worth a look.
  - a3n 13y ago
    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.
cunning1460 13y ago
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.
- adrianlmm 13y ago
  "KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now" I strongly dissagree.
  - vacri 13y ago
    I really like Cinnamon, but it's too unstable outside of Mint.
    - collyw 13y ago
      Even in Mint it seems to hog the cpu for no reason at times.
  - Zardoz84 13y ago
    ""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.
    - adrianlmm 13y ago
      Configurability doesn't make it better, in the contrary, it has to many vane options to my taste.
      - Zardoz84 13y ago
        But at least, configuration makes you free. KDE don't make you slave of his "vision" tm
        13y ago
smegel 13y ago
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.
- toupeira 13y ago
  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.
davidw 13y ago
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.
- ep103 13y ago
  This is why I jumped back to kde
  - nisa 13y ago
    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.
    - bloodorange 13y ago
      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.
elipsey 13y ago
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?
jw_ 13y ago
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.
bovermyer 13y ago
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.
- Nursie 13y ago
  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.
  - scott_karana 13y ago
    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... :(
    - Nursie 13y ago
      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.
      - scott_karana 13y ago
        Thanks!
- collyw 13y ago
  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.
tlongren 13y ago
This is awesome and I hope XFCE remains the default. I will love and use debian forever, either way.
a-l-c-o 13y ago
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.
- davidgerard 13y ago
  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?".'
  - uhohuhhuh 13y ago
    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.
    - davidgerard 13y ago
      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.
      - adrianlmm 13y ago
        With the home key instead of the window key, it is a no brainer.
        davidgerard 13y ago
        Can you unlock the screen without a physical keyboard yet?
mtgx 13y ago
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.
rick_d 13y ago
At first I thought this said "Change default desktop to xkcd"
andyl 13y ago
Unity and Gnome3 drove me to xubuntu. Really happy I made the switch.
- forktheif 13y ago
  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.
davidgerard 13y ago
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.
mmgutz 13y ago
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 http://imgur.com/nL4VGH4 That's my custom theme. The default theme is beautiful too.
yati 13y ago
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.
- stolio 13y ago
  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'.
technoir 13y ago
Too bad they didnt switch to windowlab. Now that is a lightweight window manager. Amiga style window management!
davidgerard 13y ago
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 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?"
moreentropy 13y ago
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.
- w0utert 13y ago
  >> 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 :-/
  - moreentropy 13y ago
    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.
- josteink 13y ago
  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. 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?
maaarghk 13y ago
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.
- computer 13y ago
  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_default_theme_by_gridcube-d6e1u9l.png http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/199/e/d/xubuntu_13_04...
  - maaarghk 13y ago
    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.
    - homeomorphic 13y ago
      > 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.

218 points by r0muald 13y ago

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.

Filligree 13y ago
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.
- jafaku 13y ago
  Because they are write-once (more secure).
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    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.
    - arielweisberg 13y ago
      Can't I just be a luddite who has never done it any other way?
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        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.
    - davidgerard 13y ago
      "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.
- dlitz 13y ago
  Debian's CD images are actually hybrid CD/DVD/USB images: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s03.html.en 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_CD-ROM.2FHARD_DISK_MODE http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc/isolinux#HYBRID_C...
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    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 http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb
  - pippy 13y ago
    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.
    - a-l-c-o 13y ago
      Strange.. I do it without problem at every install.
      - pippy 13y ago
        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.
    - lukeschlather 13y ago
      Ubuntu's usb-creator-gtk works fine for me. I do agree it's disappointing you can't just dd it.
- jlarocco 13y ago
  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 http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/#features
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  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
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

lucasnemeth 13y ago

Incredible closing sentence.

staz 13y ago

* The state of accessability support, particularly for the blind. it's kind of sad, Gnome was reputed for it's accessibility support

varikin 13y ago
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.

tehwalrus 13y ago

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.

IsTom 13y ago
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.
- ihsw 13y ago
  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.
  - darkandbrooding 13y ago
    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.
- el_duderino 13y ago
  Gnome 3 is awful IMO. It's not NEARLY as bad as Unity, but I still prefer Xfce myself too.
  - tehwalrus 13y ago
    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.

bjourne 13y ago

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.

r0muald 13y ago
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.
- bloodorange 13y ago
  Indeed. It's a good example of how software should be built and set up.
Aldo_MX 13y ago
Well, the change affected only configuration files, I would be scared if a change like this required a source change.
- asperous 13y ago
  Well could you imagine if Microsoft or Apple tried to change their desktop environments?
  - Aldo_MX 13y ago
    Like Windows 95 where you could pick between Program Manager and Desktop at install?
  - 13y ago

txutxu 13y ago

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

VLM 13y ago
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.
- claudius 13y ago
  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.

keithpeter 13y ago

"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?

qwerta 13y ago

Who cares?

niuzeta 13y ago
go talk about nomads.
alextingle 13y ago
Why click on the thread if you don't care?

adestefan 13y ago

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.

gcb0 13y ago
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.
abenga 13y ago
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.
- tvst 13y ago
  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.
kristianp 13y ago
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.

caycep 13y ago

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

pwnna 13y ago
In my experience, XFCE has been prettier (for me at least, using the Xubuntu theme).
vacri 13y ago
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.
- caycep 13y ago
  Is the XFCE/xubuntu community more active? I suppose that plays a big role on how much ongoing development activity there is...
  - davidgerard 13y ago
    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 ;-)
anaphor 13y ago
You might as well use a standalone window manager + various apps if you need something more "lightweight" than xfce.
davidgerard 13y ago
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.

asveikau 13y ago

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..

tehwalrus 13y ago
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.)

talles 13y ago

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.

Hinrik 13y ago
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.
- iluvuspartacus 13y ago
  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.
fein 13y ago
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.
zem 13y ago
i use xfce + xmonad. they play together very nicely.
nawitus 13y ago
I switched to LXDE after years of XFCE. Seems faster and does everything I need well. Worth a look.
- a3n 13y ago
  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.

cunning1460 13y ago

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.

adrianlmm 13y ago
"KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now" I strongly dissagree.
- vacri 13y ago
  I really like Cinnamon, but it's too unstable outside of Mint.
  - collyw 13y ago
    Even in Mint it seems to hog the cpu for no reason at times.
- Zardoz84 13y ago
  ""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.
  - adrianlmm 13y ago
    Configurability doesn't make it better, in the contrary, it has to many vane options to my taste.
    - Zardoz84 13y ago
      But at least, configuration makes you free. KDE don't make you slave of his "vision" tm
      - 13y ago

smegel 13y ago

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.

toupeira 13y ago
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.

davidw 13y ago

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.

ep103 13y ago
This is why I jumped back to kde
- nisa 13y ago
  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.
  - bloodorange 13y ago
    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.

elipsey 13y ago

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?

jw_ 13y ago

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.

bovermyer 13y ago

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.

Nursie 13y ago
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.
- scott_karana 13y ago
  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... :(
  - Nursie 13y ago
    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.
    - scott_karana 13y ago
      Thanks!
collyw 13y ago
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.

tlongren 13y ago

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

a-l-c-o 13y ago

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.

davidgerard 13y ago
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?".'
- uhohuhhuh 13y ago
  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.
  - davidgerard 13y ago
    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.
    - adrianlmm 13y ago
      With the home key instead of the window key, it is a no brainer.
      - davidgerard 13y ago
        Can you unlock the screen without a physical keyboard yet?

mtgx 13y ago

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.

rick_d 13y ago

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

andyl 13y ago

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

forktheif 13y ago
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.

davidgerard 13y ago

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.

mmgutz 13y ago

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 http://imgur.com/nL4VGH4 That's my custom theme. The default theme is beautiful too.

yati 13y ago

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.

stolio 13y ago
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'.

technoir 13y ago

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

davidgerard 13y ago

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 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?"

moreentropy 13y ago

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.

w0utert 13y ago
>> 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 :-/
- moreentropy 13y ago
  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.
josteink 13y ago
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. 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?

maaarghk 13y ago

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.

computer 13y ago
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_default_theme_by_gridcube-d6e1u9l.png http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/199/e/d/xubuntu_13_04...
- maaarghk 13y ago
  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.
  - homeomorphic 13y ago
    > 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.