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Colin Walters Talks About Debian On The Desktop
An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com caught up with Colin Walters of the Debian Desktop subproject. Launched in late October, the project aims to simplify Desktop Linux. Walters' discusses the project goal to offer 'Software which Just Works' for home and office, new user and expert ... "
It's not a replacement for either X as a windowing system or Gnome/KDE as desktop environments. It's more of a bringing together of what is available to a tighter binding so that a user can say "I want x type of desktop" (say, developer or a user) and Debian will create such an environment.
Additionally, any environment which wishes to be included as a DebianDesktop must meet a minimum set of requirements.
Locations which explain it fair better than I probably have are:
DebianDesktop
Debian Desktop Wiki
Debian Desktop Project Goals
Debian Desktop Tenets
As far as I can tell: none of the above ;-)
It's a movement to create a better oiled desktop within Debian. I.e, make sure that GNOME and KDE desktop environments install correctly and with the minimum of fuss, have the setting up of X "as easy and foolproof as possible."
It's not a change in X or GNOME/KDE code, but rather a change in which the Debian distribution will handle the installation and configuration of them. The term "wrappers" would probably too coarse a word for it, but it'll be a collection of tools which help make the desktop environment setup as nice as possible.
The Debian Desktop's project wiki has more details about the project's goals and proposals. It sounds like they are following some of the Red Hat 8.0 lead and trying to create a more unified, task-based system. Their proposals are more than just a new GUI.
cpeterso
I've got 486 thin clients running Debian with IceWM, using ROX as a GUI file manager. Of course, they also run OpenOffice and Mozilla :-) but I expect you wouldn't be using those. The 486s network boot off a read-only NFS root, then fire up X and do an -query to the XDMCP server (running gdm) so all they're really running is XFree86 4.
I strongly reccomend steering clear of fvwm2 - IceWM is a better choice in basically every way, I think it even has a smaller disk and RAM footprint actually.
This is really something that should be addressed by all distros, not just Debian.
When the user makes any customizations, she should be given an option to test the changes ("Try it now" button) and revert to the previous settings. Inexperienced users are often afraid to make changes, which in their minds (or in reality) might break something, and have a hard time getting into the habit of just playing with different options, unless they are specifically encouraged or made to feel safe.
These are great ideas.
One of the things I've seen over my many years of Slackware use is that the menus for installed window managers often do not reflect actually installed packages. It's simply got to be frustrating for a newbie to see a menu entry for an app that is not installed on the system.
And how about upgrades? It seems to me that upgrading from one version to another should automatically trigger a search to ensure that installed programs are still there so that everything actually works.
Can I help? Erm, no...sorry. I wish I could. It doesn't bother me so much as I've grown accustomed to it, but grandma sure wouldn't tolerate that for very long.
And what you fail to mention is that Debian is run/maintained/built completely by volunteers, and relies on good people's donations. Thus, this stable, powerful distribution created by this meriad of people is a testiment to their hard work and shown in the several other distributions which choose to base theirs on Debian.
Not to mention, it is a free, open distribution.
Of course, you already knew that...
Whilst you are certainly entitled to your own opinion on which distribution is best for you, not everyone shares the same opinion (and the world would be a boring place it they did).
>Btw, if your computers are a bit slow, you can buy new faster CPUs to stick in them for literally a couple of dollars.
Not really as I would have to swap motherboards also on most of them.
Thanks for the suggestions
No kidding. I am not real familiar with all the different window managers. I always thought that fvwm2 was one of the smaller quicker ones.
Thanks for the tip.
Go Buckeyes!
Berto
We all know how well a certain (unnamed) product works with its mass murder^?^?^?^?^?^?monopoly.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.