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Debian Changes Default Desktop From GNOME To XFCE
An anonymous reader writes "The default desktop within Debian 7.0 'Wheezy' has changed from GNOME to Xfce. GNOME, KDE, and LXDE will continue to be available, but the decision was made to default to Xfce. The reported reasoning comes down to size constraints in fitting GNOME on a single CD."
There's a "default desktop" in Debian? I thought everyone just installed the netinst and used apt-get to install whatever desktop they wanted.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I am okay with this. I've used XFCE on most linux server boxes for years anyway (if any graphical environment at all). Way more lightweight than Gnome or KDE and works great.
I moved to XFCE (from KDE) with the last round of dist-upgrade.
I run fanless low power machines at home (because I like peace and quiet although it has also cut down noticeably on my electricity bill) and KDE was far too slow and unresponsive.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
However... there are definitely some issues that bespeak a need for more polish. E.g. this one, or this one. Hopefully a bit more focused attention will lead to quicker fixes.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
This changes the desktop associated with the 'Desktop' task that is the default using tasksel to XFCE. You're still able to choose any desktop you like using aptitude after the install. I haven't used the tasks in tasksel in ages, so this is most interesting to users new to Debian. I'd imagine there will also be DE-targeted ISOs for Gnome/KDE/LXDE available also.
Whatever the reason is for the change, I will say "Thank god, thank you thank you thank you Debian developers".
And why is it important that a distribution fits on one?
Debian sounds a voice of reason within the community.
I wondered how they would tackle the infamous UI "situation", and this was the outcome I hoped everyone involved would have the guts to go forth with.
Rejoice for a surge of development activity for Xfce - a much more fruitful use of developer time than some other currently available UI sinks.
The article seems to imply Gnome 3 is to blame but surely the rest of Debian also increased in size.
I have one datapoint, I just installed gnome 3 in Openbsd 5.1 (It can be done and works surprisingly nice) and Obsd+X.org+Gnome3 fists completely inside a CD with a couple hundred MB to spare.
GNOME 3
Most folks grabbing debian are getting just the installer file (live-cd) and burning that to disk. If in the States, just go to your local library, college or university and grab the remainder of the disk images and put them onto a flash drive. The installer includes the ability to mount ISO images, so you have little to no problem unless the system is so old that it doesn't have USB ports. In that case, its too old to run the latest debian.
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Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I always liked XFCE. Wasn't this the default on Sarge?
Torvalds said "I'm using Xfce. I think it's a step down from gnome2, but it's a huge step up from gnome3. Really"
Some of us learn from other people's mistakes and the rest of us have to be other people. -- Zig Ziglar
It's probably a sane choice to move debian away from gnome and towards xfce, but I wonder if the reason is very sound. They should have switched to DVD as the default ISO media many years ago, becuase people who are on such an old computer that it lacks a DVD will surely want to use the less than 200 MB netinstall ISO instead.
I think that it's still important with an offline-installable system, but limiting yourself to CD when DVD has been the standard for ages is just weird and shows of stagnation and "get off my lawn".
c++;
Why is a CD's capacity the deciding factor for a component with such broad repercussions throughout the OS? It's 2012, folks. How many new installations are really made or broken on what works from a 700MB CD when a 4.7GB DVD is an incredibly common substitute?
I'm not ridiculing this decision, despite my surprised tone. I'm actually interested in learning more about the reasoning behind it, if anyone has some more background.
Oh, don't worry about that; any excuse will do!
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
You were good for a while.
Nice knowing you.
If in the States
Here's a weird little fact. Many people don't live in the USA.
Many people also don't have unlimited access to the Internet, or unlimited money. For these reasons it makes sense to continue supporting the simplest, cheapest way of distributing software on physical media, and that is a CD-ROM.
people who are on such an old computer that it lacks a DVD
It's not that your computer lacks a DVD drive as much as lacking wired broadband Internet access to the home. Downloading a disc image that fills a single-layer DVD will use up most of the 5 GB per month data allowance typical of a home satellite or cellular Internet plan, as will downloading 5 GB of packages using the net installer.
FVWM baby!
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
It's 2012, folks.
And in 2012, wireless ISPs still impose monthly caps not much more than the capacity of a 4.7 GB DVD. Or must everyone drive into town and find a library willing to let the user sit and download an entire DVD image to a flash drive? In 2012?
I used XFCE for a while years ago, after one of the bloatenings of Gnome. Switched back and had been pretty happy with Gnome until they started turning it into WebTV. Still struggled along with classic mode for a while, but they've been dumbing that as well. Switched back to XFCE and very pleased.
If you want a thin client for the cloud, Gnome/Windows 8/Mountain Lion/ChromeOS are all fine. If you want a computer, XFCE/Debian may be the best option.
I tend to think a divergence is inevitable. The masses don't want a computer and never did. They grudgingly used them because it was where all the good stuff was. Now that the oligarchs are offering convenience as an alternative to liberty, most people are lining up. The hardware manufacturers are falling right in line with UEFI, the network providers are pushing to cripple the nasty peer-to-peer design of the Internet, and everyone with an IQ below 120 (and a surprising percentage of those above) can easily be convinced they are happier this way. It's called progress.
Ummm, which is why I like XFCE... OK, bit of a digression there. But maybe that suggests a motto: "XFCE: Don't shuffle blandly into the decline."
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I just get the credit card sized iso aka 50MB.
Basic terminal and the coreutils. Rest is apt-get
Good. the sooner Gnome is forgotten about the better, it went from buggy 2d 1990s desktop with hidden fetures and built-in windows registry editor, to an overblown, over sized, infantile looking, bloated schizophrenic fisher-price users-are-dumb interface, whilst still hiding features from *poor dumb users*.. plenty of other DE's and WM's out there which er, dont insult your inteligence. Forget Gnome anyway, it was ok back in the 90s for a year or two, before we knew better, but Gnome stayed there, and as Gnome sooooooo desperately wanted to to be the Mac's Aqua interface (which is just as schizophrenic, regardless of Apples UI guidelines) - Apple's UI goes all touch-paddy, and dumbing down, Gnome wakes up, still back in the 90s, and rushes so fast to catch up to the 'new' UI trends it over-compensates and fails miserably... what a mess. Gnome, you've had your time.. go fade now into obscurity .. and take pulseaudio with you..
It's the one included on the CD.
It's really not much of an issue if you netinst, which I'd recommend anyway, the install CD's are outdated quite shortly after you burn them.
After release of GNOME 3 I moved into opposite direction (I was using xfce for many years).
Anyway it's a good thing, because I dislike GNOME/KDE integration of single applications, for instance I use k3b which is only usable dvd burner and it comes from KDE. If xfce will be default then maybe some people realize applications should work everywhere not fit GNOME desktop.
Gnome is going it's own way and that might not fit with what Debian wants to do.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/08/08/1323228/gnome-developers-lay-out-plans-for-gnome-os
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I moved to Bodhi Linux with its Enlightenment desktop, and like it. That's the fun thing - everyone can find their own escape route from Gnome3 since Linux offers so many choices.
Bodhi is very lightweight and was easy to configure (though it took me a day to figure out E17's vocabulary). I'm very happy, and it's a simple CD download, which is good - I don't have much bandwidth.
DVD downloads are a hassle, in my opinion. When it comes time to download one I usually resort to purchasing from one of the companies that advertises on distrowatch.org.
I highly recommend Bodhi though - it's very sharp and polished.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
I installed one of the BSDs from a couple dozen *floppies* back in the 90s. No desktop or applications. Just a very basic system. I don't recall if it even had the compiler; but it worked. CDs. Sheesh.
If only there were a widely adopted optical media format that held ten times what a CD-ROM does, or a method for booting from USB drives...
I personally use the classic twm with it's organized menus and speed
It's about time for XFCE to become the default of a major distro. Since 4.8, it's definitely been polished enough.
For those of you longing for the trustworthy gnome2 desktop, try Mate: http://mate-desktop.org/
What is MATE?
MATE is a fork of Gnome 2.
Judging by the screenshots on their website, it looks unrefined and downright ugly compared to a modern desktop.
Funny, if you read comments on slashdot everyone outside the US has better, cheaper, faster, access with less censorship, better porn, and unlimited storage.
When I install a Linux distro, I generally just adapt to the default desktop environment, although my preference tends to be KDE.
My largest problem with GNOME is not its modularity or architecture, but the shear bulk of repitition of doing a single task. GNOME has become its own worst enemy and a victim of its own success -- open source (check!), lots of options (check! check!), even more options because someone forked (check! check! check! check! check!)...
True, but their nearly unlimited storage is full of cheap, uncensored, high quality porn. All that's left is a few blank CDs.
Debian is a desktop OS. What does a wireless ISP have to do with any of this?
Living outside the service area of DSL, cable, or fiber means you have to use dial-up, a satellite ISP, or a cellular ISP to connect the desktop computer to the Internet.
Queue the "OMG the default choice is NOW my favorite choice" comments.
Seriously anyone installing Debian straight no mixer does not care what DE is on the cd.
Your cs prof was wrong.
"Mega" means 1,000,000 as an SI prefix, but "bytes" are not an SI unit, so the there is no authority to tell us what "Mega" means when used with "bytes".
As with other English words, the rule is to go with actual use. Which in this case means a megabyte can be any of the following, depending on context:
-1,000,000 bytes = 1 Megabyte
-1,024,000 bytes = 1 Megabyte
-1,048,576 bytes = 1 Megabyte
These are ALL correct usage.
The correct SI unit of information is, of course, the Joule-per-Kelvin, which happens to be an extemely large unit.
Sounds like a good idea. I upgraded from Squeeze to Wheezy a couple of weeks ago, and GNOME was just too slow - the shell and X were using hundreds of megabytes of memory each, and both were using a surprising amount of CPU even when they weren't doing anything in particular. I changed to XFCE and it was much faster. There are some minor annoyances - xscreensaver doesn't deactivate when playing movies with mplayer, there is no way to bind keyboard shortcuts to the audio mixer commands - but it's still lightyears better than GNOME.
1) There's the US, where any internet access is expensive, capped and, above all, slow. However, hardware is cheap and plentiful. You can't fart on YouTube without a swat team killing your dog. One nipple-slip and you're toast.
2) There's Europe, where internet access via DSL or cable is cheap, fast and wide-spread. Hardware is more expensive and choice is limited to the big brands. No one cares what you post or download, whatsoever, on any subject.
3) There's South-East Asia, where internet access is 3G, 4G, 5G, or whatever, insanely fast and costs next to nothing. More hardware than you can enumerate before the next batch comes along, can all be picked up for chump change. As long as you don't get marked as 'troublesome' for the government, nobody cares about you or the depraved things you post to 4chan.
4) And last there is the rest of the world. There, internet access is horrendously expensive, not widely available and prone to speeds your US Robotics modem would not be proud of. Hardware is expensive, even when very dated.
Having a distro fit on one CD might be for that last category. Or, as you might call it, "most of the world".
Pfff .. fitting on a CD, how last century.
Multiple floppies? Decedent capitalist pig-dog!
I did several installs starting from a single floppy with a kernel, shell, and ftp. Once on the network, nothing else is needed.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/ufiles/debian_netinstall.png
If you do a netinstall, there comes a point when you are asked if you want to install a "Standard system" and there is a choice for "Desktop environment" without any futher choice. In Debian, this meant gnome. If you do the same with ubuntu (minimal iso=netinstall), it shows a longer list with choices including lxde, xfce, kde an others.
http://i.imgur.com/DTFyq.png
Debian does have better tasksel choices, but they are not exposed by the installer. Sure, any pro user can stick to Standard system and after finishing, complete the install from the command line (either by running tasksel and or apt-get/aptitude, etc.
But the point is, if you do pick "Standard" and "Desktop" in the installer, it would install a gnome desktop.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
GNOME always had a huge load of dependencies, and this is only getting worse as time goes by. Yes, this includes 2.x, but most of us wouldn't bother because it was popular - most would simply keep it, some would install something else, and few would have the trouble of uninstalling it.
However, since lots of people hate GNOME 3, the odds of people needing to remove all its packages rise sharply: "I DON'T WANT THAT UGLY BLOAT IN MY SYSTEM!" isn't something unheard... keeping GNOME 3.x as default DE would be counter-productive both to Debian's loyal fanbase (giving them more work) and to new users (since most potential users are turned off by retarded defaults in any distro).
Yes, there is net-inst. No, you don't need to install even the default desktop. But people, when getting in touch with a distro, will first and foremost go by the easier way - using the defaults. So, while they probably weren't lying that Debian+GNOME isn't fitting a CD anymore, it's probably the least concern that made them drop it as default.
Nerdy news for your nerdy needs? http://www.soylentnews.org Soylent News is people!
If in the States
Here's a weird little fact. Many people don't live in the USA.
That'll have been why the paragraph included the qualifier "if in the States", then.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I can deal with some rough edges, and if more distros start picking them up as default and if the dev community is healthy, they'll soon pick up enough contributors to smooth those out.
But the xfce dev community doesn't really seem healthy. Instead, it seems to be composed of maladjusted 13-year-olds. Calling your project's utility for connecting additional filesystems a male prostitute "because it mounts what it is told to" may seem like a great laugh in the middle school locker room, but it's immature, offensive, and unprofessional, will turn users away from the project, and will guarantee its rejection for e.g. corporate desktop use.
I have been a fan of xfce in the past, used it quite a bit in the 3.x days, and have an xubuntu vm I use on occasion. But if it's to be a serious contender in the desktop space they have to consider that this isn't just for their own dogfood use and start considering the needs and sensibilities of their users rather than filling it with crass inside jokes between the developers.
Sadly, you are 100 % right.
UEFI may be the last nail in the coffin for widespread adoption of free operating systems.
Is there any hope?
I like my spaghetti with source.
XFCE is a fantastic DE that is very flexible, customizable, easy-to-use, and mature. It runs great on old and new hardware. It runs better over NFS than Gnome ever has, it works great over NX or VNC.
I've used it on-and-off since the very beginning. It has always been a stable DE that has managed to evolve over time without every significantly alienating its user base.
Every year or two I upgrade or replace the Linux side of our Linux dual-boot lab machines at work. Since at least 2006 I've been defaulting to XFCE (early 4.0 and newer.)
Not once have the students complained about the desktop. True, it isn't super-flashy but it works like a charm.
(And, as an added bonus, I can still make it look like BeOS if I want to.)
Switching to DVDs probably just encourages bloat (e.g. GNOME3) when there are plenty of usable alternatives that fit current restrictions.
Automatically switching constraints to fit inside the next largest available media is like buying pants with larger and larger waists as you grow fatter and fatter. Sure, sometimes you need to actually get bigger pants (e.g. during a growth spurt when you're 12) but there comes a time when what you have is going to be good enough for a loooooong time (or at least, should be).
You don't see people yelling at others for wanting to fit in the pants they've been wearing for a while. Why is optical media any different? If your installer and default desktop environment is too big to fit in 700MB of space, then somebody's (or some bodies are) doing it wrong.
It's not just about constraints in resources, it's about the principle: I want my pants to fit forever, and so does Debian.
Who even still has *any* kind of optical drive? And for what?
Get those people a cheap hard drive, and a USB stick, like normal people.
And maybe a new calendar.
Yaaaayyy! around the world 34 geeks just spilled beer on their tighty whiteys,, crap.. I just spilled beer on my tighty whiteys,,,, make it 35....
It increases fragmentation. Our community is already tiny; we can't afford to be divided.
I switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu for this reason. I am now better informed to help people fix their Ubuntu problems; everyone benefits.
By the way, Unity is very good. it is beautiful, easy, convenient, fun, and saves screen real state.
I love Unity. It is beautiful, easy, convenient, fun and save screen real state.
I can only think that people who hate it do it simply because it is different.
I miss the old XFCE that mimicked CDE
Good. It's about time GNOME was flushed away. XFCE might not be perfect but at least they don't chase Apple about making awful copies of their MAC devices.
When I see a computer with Gnome on I really do think it's got Down's Syndrome.
Shame really.
Who did mod it down? It is absolutely NOT against Slashdot comment guidelines.
It is my genuine view. It is polite and on topic.
Shame on you, moderators! There are _guidelines_ for moderation, you are not supposed to mod down everything you disagree with!
XFCE is a fantastic DE that is very flexible, customizable, easy-to-use, and mature. It runs great on old and new hardware. It runs better over NFS than Gnome ever has, it works great over NX or VNC.
I've used it on-and-off since the very beginning. It has always been a stable DE that has managed to evolve over time without every significantly alienating its user base.
Every year or two I upgrade or replace the Linux side of our Linux dual-boot lab machines at work. Since at least 2006 I've been defaulting to XFCE (early 4.0 and newer.)
Not once have the students complained about the desktop. True, it isn't super-flashy but it works like a charm.
(And, as an added bonus, I can still make it look like BeOS if I want to.)
This. I agree entirely!
At last! The new Gnome is too Gooey imo / my laptop is useless.
I think it is more likely that Debian devs are gently urging users not to inflict Gnome 3 on themselves.