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Debian Switching Back To GNOME As the Default Desktop
An anonymous reader writes: Debian will switch back to using GNOME as the default desktop environment for the upcoming Debian 8.0 Jessie release, due out in 2015. The decision is based on accessibility and systemd integration, along with a host of other reasons. Debian switched away from GNOME back in 2012 .
Maybe Gnome is friendlier for noobs or something. Are there noobs left in the world?
...Steve
I have stopped using Gnome ever since the developers decided to stop listening to the users and fucked up the whole thing
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The 3D acceleration is still broken in stock Mesa.
You're my only hope!
Regardless of the distro, I install KDE and I'm good to go. The only thing I use the "default" GUI for is any tools that aren't portable.
Gnome 3 sucks farts off dead chickens in August... :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Why are the major distros that people use for servers choosing to switch to gnome3 and systemd? Gnome3 I can understand, but there are some enterprise software that require RHEL then also require a GUI for configuration or installation and ssh -Y doesn't always cut it. It would be nicer to have xfce as default. But systemd for server distros is unconscionable.
I've been a long time slashdot user, but there are many words people syaing that idont u nderstand. systemd??? what is system??
Why on earth would you do that?
Monumentally Bad move Batman. The greater DD voters need to reclaim the committee and get back to core business.
Kill this thing dead now.
It's a beautiful desktop environment and very functional. Oh well. I see. Systemd. Yeah yeah. Ok debian, it's good bye. It has been a really nice ride, thank you very much for all the wonderful years of providing me with a stable and no-nonsense linux distro!
The Gnome desktop would be my last choice.
Systemd is the main reason NOT to use gnome, another reason is that it sucked long before the other *DEs started sucking.
Seems to me like a good reason not to use Debian, if they won't cater for power users.
I used GNOME as my primary desktop environment for almost a decade starting with 2.4 on Fedora Core 1. I watched as many features I cared for were either hidden or removed for simplicity's sake, but I kept with it because for the most part I could restore the features with minimal hassle and I liked the overall look & feel. I even put up with early GNOME 3 as I felt 3.4 & 3.6 were progressively improving. However by 3.8 I was getting fed up of having to constantly figure out how to restore features I want, and I had absolutely no interest in running systemd just to run a damn GUI. I had enough, jumped to XFCE4 and have it customized to a very similar setup to GNOME 2 and have been very satisfied.
It takes a lot to alienate someone who has used the same software for a decade, but they've managed to it. I felt like each released "dumbed" the product down more and more and I kept thinking to myself that old saying, "If you make something idiot proof, someone will just make a better idiot". I don't know what kind of consumer they want to attract, but apparently I'm no longer it.
At least with Debian, the default desktop doesn't necessarily mean much as it's quite simple to install an alternative.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I think "power users" know that they don't have to go with the default DE when installing Debian, and they probably also know that they can install most any DE they wish.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
Come, join us, Cinnamon is what you want.
Running Debian Jessie (testing) right now, and KDE is the ONLY way to go... At least the default XFCE was not too bad, but I always prefer KDE over pretty much ANY other DE, but going to that piece of shit Gnome is a special kind of stupid... The only DE worse than Gnome is Unity or Windows 8.... What with all the crap software that many distros are trying to shove down our throats (like systemd and Gnome), I'm beginning to think its back to my Linux roots, namely Slackware... Cut my teeth on that distro back in 1994... Glad its still around and hopefully not going down the shithole like everybody else in the Linux world...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Because random init scripts sucks, and every modern linux user (like the devs of these distros) knows that. All you grouchy gray beards with fossilized minds are the only ones complaining.
CoreOS uses systemd. RedHat has nothing to do with CoreOS. CoreOS makes use of systemd via a program called 'fleet'. The program manages a cluster of containers. Pretty cool stuff. Fleet is not the only program to do this. RedHat created geard that also uses systemd for container management. Systemd is actually pretty useful in a server.
But will the system be systemd-free in the future?
enlightenment.org. Best desktop.
You mean the people that are the reason Linux lives in the enterprise and on so many servers, and are the ones who can kill its presence there too.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
After something like 20 years I finally found a system that won't run Debian unstable right now. My Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 magnesium tablet + iKey Jumpseat magnesium keyboard. Systemd and GDM break. Bought (for less than full price) because I am a frequent traveler and speaker and really do need something you can drop from 6 feet and pour coffee over have it keep working.
But because of this bug I have ubuntu at the moment, and am not having fun and am eager to return to Debian.
Bruce Perens.
Linux-From-Scratch is easier to use, less user-hostile and less determined to tell me how to think.
ANY software that pretends to know better than me how I want things done is software that deserves to burn. And then sink into the swamp. It is that precise attitude that got me to kick the Windows habit and led me away from the early ix86 BSDs.
I not only think better than a mere machine, I think better than your average distro compiler. I can spec better, I can build better, I can test better. Debian had, up till now, been acceptable, the packages are convenient and it's no great pain to tune. Now, Debian ranks lower than Fedora. I'd recommend the MCC distribution before either and that was last updated during the Ice Age.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
my mother is a noob and she loves gnome-shell
I like Gnome 3 more than Unity. Really nice on my big screen TV.
Then again, I like Windows 8 too. And KDE. And XFCE. And Blackbox. And OS X. The anti-new-user interface crowd is astonishing.
...the screwed up systemd (which has things that are debatable at best for something that should be deemed "mission critical" for the OS and should either gracefully recover or not fail at all- instead of the shrug your shoulders and say "best effort" and lose info like logs...)- that...that should be jettisoned and started over. The **ONLY** reason it's even got legs right now is that Red Hat's doing a Microsoft and jamming it down everyone's throat. Now...if you decoupled it so that it wasn't this monolithic homesick abortion of a one-size-fits-all solution and made it a series of services, which don't have opaque binary formats for anything- you'd have a win. It's main functionality is needed- the execution...SUCKS.
Lest anyone thinks I was one of the naysayers until recently...I changed sides when I saw one of their bugs wherein the log could get corrupted because of a collision, etc. and quite simply lost content out of box- and they say basically "oh, well...not fixing it...". NOT something you want to say with something crucial like system logging. Sorry, like I said...we need something LIKE it- just not the current execution, because it's based off of code written and designs done up by people that have absolutely no business developing a core function like this on something as important as Linux distributions. You have to design and write the code as if someone's life depends on it- and not have any "oh, well" attitudes ANYWHERE In the mix.
Software that is designed correctly separates out what it does, how it does it, and how it interacts with the outside world.
Ergo, software that is correctly designed is user-agnostic. If the user thinks in a particular way, whatever that way happens to be, it is the job of the software to accommodate that. If it does not, it is not software for users, it is software that has users. Possession is everything.
Software that is correctly designed is configuration-agnostic. If the configuration file states something is enabled, then that is enabled. It is not the job of the software to say the file really means something else. If the configuration is broken, state how and why. Clearly. If the configuration is old, import and update. But don't tell me, or anyone else, what Joe Bloggs thinks would look better. I don't care. And the more other people's preferences get shoved in my face, the less I will care.
Theo clearly has the right idea - the only way to get past the morons is with an attitude of utter contempt. Bugger all else matters, apparently.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Doesn't matter. It's not tested or validated for every possibility. Hell, given how easily I can break Debian, I wonder if it's tested at all these days. There is no point in using unvalidated setups with a distro, if you're at that point then you should roll your own.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Heh...same here. I moved to XFCE4 due to both GNOME and Ubuntu having their heads up their collective asses. I left KDE for the same reasons in the 2.x series.
(Hint for all the GUI devs doing stuff on Linux: You don't know "better" than the users. Things like "shared ontologies" and other rubbish is a bunch of garbage posing as a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Be "different" but do try to figure out what "different" is and realize that hosing up the I/O subsystem so you can do idiot things like Nepomuk (that most people cripple out on their distributions VERY quickly because of the periodic performance hit because your "shared ontologies" system is trawling the disk and hammering the system while it's doing it. You had it right numerous versions ago. My only hope is that Enlightenment takes off and they don't screw it up or that LXDE or XFCE keeps going forward well right at the moment- because GNOME, KDE, and Unity AREN'T IT.)
Go back to Windows. If you can't cope with people wanting to choose how to run their system, you don't deserve software that's all about choice. If insults are the best reason you have for living, do everyone a favour.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have heard they are being strong-armed by Canonical. Canonical makes donations to Debian, that puts Canonical in a position to influence Debian.
Everybody knows that Gnome3 and Systemd suck. But the leading Linux distros are forcing that unwanted crap on users in a very Microsoft sort of way.
I am not that surprised by Red Hat, or Canonical, but I am disappointed in Debian.
If things go similarly as they did on Archlinux, removing systemd will take a lot of work. Systemd works like a virus, and it has infected dozens of packages already. Many packages that depend on systemd actually work fine even if you don't run it, so a compromise is to keep systemd installed so things continue working and use something less horrible for init.
Go back in time 5 years and tell everyone Linux would be using binary log files, watch the fireworks. Systemd is from the same people who brought you the sometimes working Pulseaudio system. If init scripts did suck so badly then why were they in use for decades? Why was a replacement this long in the making?
Next you guys are going to be talking about this great binary system for config files like the guys in Redmond use.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Scripts break easily and are slow to execute.
I could not use gnome 3. blah blah as a desktop it was trying to be a mobile phone, and my computer was too big to put it to my ear. Besides I did not want a mobile phone I wanted a desktop so I stayed with Debian 6.0 the gnome desktop is still usable with that version. My big Homebase workstation still runs OpenSuSe with KDE, a customised version. I use two different languages every time it automatically updates KDE, with updates and security fixes I always feel nervous! In case it fucks things up. I cannot use the default KDE because of the misty looking desktop the edges are misty and it fools my eyes into believing they are out of focus it makes me suffer chronic migraines. So I switch off the blurred edges and KDE desktop effects. Long story short I multitask at a very fast speed which makes some people laugh watching me. I use KDE a customised version I cannot use the new mobile phone lookalike gnome desktop I just cannot work with it, it makes me furious it makes me want to put my fist through the monitor. I throw a tantrum and call the people who have turned it into a mobile phone all sorts of names. I hate it and I cannot have it as a desktop it simply doesn't function as a computer desktop.. it is simply impersonating a mobile phone interface. Look just leave the desktops alone do something useful go and work for a mobile phone company. My English is not good today been speaking another language it takes time to switch back.
I haven't included the "desktop system" or whatever dselect offers you in a Debian install since probably the turn of the century. I usually just install the minimum base system and apt-get the stuff I want, which resulted in wmaker up till about 2002, and XFCE since. I'm not saying this to sound l33t or anything, but I remember doing it this way all along to avoid installing Gnome.
What was Debian's default desktop before now?
do() || do_not();
It's times like this that I'm glad that I use Debian exclusively for headless servers that never see a GUI.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Scripts are understood, easy to search and edit, debug and maintain. Systemd adds a layer of complexity that's not wanted. Journald means extra work as well, that nobody asked for.
Execution speed? Not relevant.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
It was XFCE.
And good lord have you ever heard of mySQL? I hear thats binary too!
PST, its all binary.
...will you Linux phanbois continue to argue over which desktop is superior? I've used several flavors of 'nix since before there was a desktop manager. And like almost EVERYTHING ELSE in the whole wide world (the original WWW), what works for one might not work for someone else. This is obvious if you'll pay attention to the fact that it's only since 2012 that Debian moved away from GNOME. Yet here they are, back again. I realize that it's been almost three whole years and that's like half of some of your lifetimes. But gimme a break. Besides it's not like you couldn't use GNOME with Debian if you desire. And if you're that much of a purist why the hell are you using a GUI anyway? Dig up that green screen (actually I prefer amber) and get crackin'! Why not nut up and be strong enough to accept the idea that there are several varieties of desktop manager for a reason; different strokes for different folks.
i don't think anyone runs debian as a desktop friendly distribution. In my case, i have a small server on it, and installed a GUI not for me, but for everyone else that may use it and get lost without a GUI. I chose XFCE.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Systemd, wayland, and gnome are shit for games. It's going to be a clusterfuck.
Eh? Scripts don't break themselves. They do exactly what you tell them to do.
Yeah, and we don't use MySQL for system boot configuration either because it would be way more complex than it needs to be.
Funny I've never had an init script "break" in 25+ years of Unix and Linux administration. Tell me does it make a snapping sound? Does it break because the summer weather made it get wet and soft? Can they be glued back together?
Such sweeping generalizations. Servers may not have desktop GUIs installed, but we have plenty of people running Linux as a desktop for their workstation with a VM running Windows if they need a Windows only application.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
That is false, most of your Linux distro written by people that have nothing whatever to do with systemd. Plenty of kernel developers think it is pure shit
You are confused, the logging in a Linux system is text. So are configuration files.
Mysql is for people who occassionally like to use data, so funny you picked that for example.
No logging from systemd is now in binary form and needs special viewers and processing tools. So all the classic text programs like tail or grep or awk can no longer be used. This is a solution in search of a problem.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
s/scripts/software
The issue was hotly debated and decided on some months ago. Sorry you're late to the party!
I was wondering that too.
Also, if SystemD is so well built, why is integrating it with KDE so difficult?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The only way to determine which has an advantage is to conduct UX research from a completely unbiased standpoint.
The enemy of my enemy is quite possibly also my enemy. I've made a lot of enemies.
Never changes and runs like water. So you shouldn't be subjected to any new and exciting games of hide and seek with your terminal after every time there's a version upgrade.
I'm using openbox + tint2, well enough for me.
my whole workflow is based on the quaintly named "classic desktop model" where screens and windows don't magically resize and change position (...) I'd switch to LXDE or XFCE, but they're a little too light-weight for my taste
What does "a little too light-weight" mean? Something like JWM or icewm?**
LXDE has a useful set of features and it won't waste your time with unwanted "special effects". If you really are frustrated by the barkers at the KDE-Gnome-Mate-Cinnamon desktop carnival, I suggest that you try Debian LXDE or even Lubuntu.
The configurable simplicity of LXDE is the main reason to use it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers)
One of the main reasons why the Debian folks switched from Gnome to XFCE was that they couldn't fit Gnome on a CD anymore. The fact that the market is abandoning optical disks in favour of USB/SDHC booting doesn't mean that I want KDE/Gnome bloat.
**Disclaimer: I use icewm on my Raspberry Pi(s). The icewm DE light, simple, and easy to understand. Oh yeah, and the R.Pi won't run much else very well anyway. (o;
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
But stretching so deep into userspace that a window manager is impacted in any way?
It should just kick off X and get out of the way, leaving whatever your display manager is to do the job from then on.
Some tool may make noises about what is X needs to be restarted, not understanding that that's been handled nicely without bothering init for a couple of decades at least.
If it's something about having a set of desktop applications starting up automaticly after login there's been plenty of ways that have worked well over the last couple of decades.
really its debian, you install it cause your tired of all the CRAP that comes on its variants
debian should give me a giant ass menu of all the crap I want on install, or not install anything aside from the core system so I can do it myself, If I want 100,000 jack ass packages ill use ubuntu, least it has firefox without having to fuck with text files for apt-get
Gnome has been the default but about a year ago they switched testing over to Xfce just to see how things would work out. Apparently they decided that Gnome was a better default and changed it back.
To finally lift linux to the level of a real OS like Windows, with reboots after upgrade and the equivalent of bluescreen when everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-d crashes.
...wait wat!?
And that works?
Halle f'ing luja!
Actually, it is. Everything that goes into stable is tested. That's of course not a guarantee that there won't be bugs though.
The main point of having a "default desktop" is that it is what you'll get if you're installing of CD, with no network to download packages from. It's irrelevant to probably 99% people in US, but some other countries are not so lucky.
...right back at 1.x. I survived 2.x
Nowadays, I ditched XFCE because it's becoming more and more like GNOME.
I turned away from all that disgusting Desktop stuff and am a happy FVWM2 user. I've had enough bloat, incomprehensible policy hidden away in some obscure daemons (instead of in readable config files), NetworkManager, Avahi, a web server as printer spooler (CUPS: seriously?), *-kit and all that crap growing by accretion in the name of user friendliness.
To which user are you trying to be friendly? Not to me, at least.
People choosing Debian usually have a minimum of knowledge so that they can easily avoid choosing the default desktop from the installer, and pick another one later, usually by installing a single master packet that will manage all the dependencies automatically.
It's impossible to design something that is 'agnostic' to everyone as everyone thinks differently and makes different assumptions. Therefore, designers have to make certain assumptions of their own and expect users to stretch out a bit and learn them. Good designers will write reasonable documentation or build intuitive hints into their designs to facilitate this, but going too far makes it difficult to be efficient with the tool. Unfortunately, designs like gnome 3.x, metro, osx, unity, and mobile interfaces clearly show this has become a trend.
While tools that are difficult to use for no good reason aren't great, especially when the task is relatively simple, tools that make too many assumptions about complex tasks under the guise of simplicity often prevent user skill growth and understanding. The inflexibility that comes with this just pisses the experienced users off. It shouldn't take 6 clicks to do something that should take 1, nor does it make sense to remove all the functionality except that which only takes 1 click just to make it less 'confusing' to do easy things. Who is the target user for interfaces like these? bonobos?
Debian with Gnome Classic is how God intended computers to function.
If init scripts did suck so badly then why were they in use for decades?
Ah, the Windows XP fallacy.
But after this change, you will not be installing from a CD anymore, see the official statement: "However, the Debian live team doesn't care about fitting on a traditional CD; and while the Debian CD team hasn't made a statement, my impression as a member is that this is not something we care enough about any more to make it a hard blocker on the default desktop." It is a bit sad, that after this the Debian is not easily installable to older machines, which are not able to boot from USB.
Is that still the case? here's an explanation about issues between KDE and systemd i've found "As ConsoleKit is deprecated, systemd offers its own daemon to keep track of sessions and assigned seats in a system. However, the KDE Workspaces rely on ConsoleKit to handle user switching, reboot, shutdown and a lot of their things. Removing ConsoleKit would mean that users would suffer feature loss. On the other hand, with something that’s been deprecated and no longer actively worked on, you have issues with maintenance." i took it from thjs link https://www.dennogumi.org/2012...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Your comment is especially dense. Init scripts do suck and systemd is FAR from the first to try and work around their many shortcomings. As one article put it, they just so happen to be the first guys who were able to market it to be the default in major distros. That and they crammed every other solution into one box and shipped it which is not nice, but init scripts have plenty of complaints about them.
Speaking of did you realise we used phones with actual buttons for decades too? Oh and horses, oh the horror. The time frame we used something is NEVER a good indicator for any of its qualities.
As for Pulseaudio, yeah it was flaky, but at least it worked sometimes. How many other audio systems can you mention in Linux which seamlessly allowed you to add devices to an audio stream, hot plug blue-tooth headsets, or change destinations of streams without interrupting them? Yes it too has warts, but so did its nasty-in-other-ways predecessors.
> Scripts break easily and are slow to execute.
This is such a hunk of shit I don't know where to begin:
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ cat hello
> #!/bin/bash
> echo "Hello, bash"
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ cat hello-c.c
> #include
>
> int main(int argc, char *argv[])
> {
> printf("Hello, world!\n");
> }
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ cat hello.java
> public class hello {
> public static void main(String[] args) {
> System.out.println("Goodbye, Java!\n");
> }
> }
> The setup explained, now the numbers.
> First, c: (every run twice, to show the effect of FS cache; machine has gobs of RAM for this task (8GB) but is a bit thin on CPU; each pair of runs we flush the cache):
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ sudo bash -c "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" ./hello-c ./hello-c
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ time
> Hello, world!
>
> real 0m0.067s
> user 0m0.000s
> sys 0m0.000s
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ time
> Hello, world!
>
> real 0m0.004s
> user 0m0.000s
> sys 0m0.000s
3ms when warm. Barely measurable with "time" anyway.
Now comes bash (yeah, I know dash is way faster, but I don't care):
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ sudo bash -c "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ time bash hello
> Hello, bash
>
> real 0m0.082s
>user 0m0.000s
> sys 0m0.008s
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ time bash hello
> Hello, bash
>
> real 0m0.009s
> user 0m0.000s
> sys 0m0.004s
Not bad. Note the extra sys time (even when warm). But note also that "warm" would be the default state for your default shell anyway. And perhaps we're being unfair to bash, because by interposing "time" we're forcing it to fork, exec, exec (at least). But we're reading tea leaves anyway.
Now, Java (sit down!):
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ sudo bash -c "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ time java hello
> Goodbye, Java!
>
>
> real 0m2.198s
> user 0m0.336s
> sys 0m0.140s
> tomas@rasputin:~/hello$ time java hello
> Goodbye, Java!
>
>
> real 0m0.227s
> user 0m0.172s
> sys 0m0.044s
Yikes.
So shell was slow why again?
(BTW: fuck slashdot's lameness filter)
I'm not pro systemd, but binary log files have been in UNIX/Linux forever.
take a look at utmp, wtmp, or btmp
UX is about more than just UI.
Most of the "weighing in" so far is about, among other things, not screwing over your customers with a bloated sysadmin nightmare of an init program. The closest you're going to get to a study is The Art of Unix Programming .
Wonder what the public key field is for?
PulseAudio took 5 years to become usably stable for an audio system. Extrapolating, systemd is ripe for discussing seriously in maybe 10 years.
How many machines are out there that don't have a DVD drive? OK, I have one, gathering dust. I'll modify the question: how many machines are in use that have a CD drive but not a DVD one?
The last time I used Live Build, it produces (by default) an image that will work on USB or optical media.
http://live.debian.net/manual/...
If size is the problem, you can customize what packages are installed till you get below 700M.
No really sure what you're whining about, to be honest.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I just setup my Linux development host to boot Openbox from .xinit and - to my surprise - have never been happier with any desktop including the one on the airbook I'm using to type this post. It really never occurred to me how little I need from a DE.
I'm starting to believe that the state-of-the-art in desktop environments is a silly pile of bloat. An application where simplicity and lack-of-clutter are critical attributes breaks under the weight of too many features.
How many machines are out there that don't have a DVD drive?
I've got about 50 4-core 16GB 1U servers with a CD drive but no DVD. Of course I install via USB HDD to one and clone to the others, but point stands that such machines still exist.
Right from the post from Debian the XFCE team states that haven't seen an increase in their development. It is rather easy to pick the desktop during the install of Debian, so who really cares what the default is? If you are using Debian I'm going to assume you know how to switch the desktop environment during install or you are at least capable of typing "install XFCE instead of Gnome in Debian" into google.
Sent from my TARDIS
If you have 50 servers you should really take a look at pxe and installing it over the network with tools like FAI.
How many machines are out there that don't have a DVD drive? OK, I have one, gathering dust. I'll modify the question: how many machines are in use that have a CD drive but not a DVD one?
The last time I used Live Build, it produces (by default) an image that will work on USB or optical media.
http://live.debian.net/manual/...
If size is the problem, you can customize what packages are installed till you get below 700M.
No really sure what you're whining about, to be honest.
My laptop is three years old and doesn't have an optical drive at all.
Initscripts don't break because package maintainers put a lot of effort in to maintaining them for a given distro. Unit-files are much cleaner, can be maintained upstream and shared by many distros. Freeing up package maintainers to work on other things.
This is likely a large reason why all the major distro's bandwagoned on to systemd, and people don't seem to realize how much man power went in to maintaining the init system by packages that use it. No need to do process tracking, pid files, run lock files, restart on crash, proper daemonizing, run level checking, dependency checking in every script which is 80% of the boilerplate in most scripts.
Plenty of kernel developers are also happy to see systemd using features they worked hard on developing (i.e. cgroups). The GP had it wrong though. The people who are most embracing of systemd are the people who spend time actually maintaining initscripts for distros.
My "studies" show that users will bitch about everything that has changed and where they need to rethink their workflows.
On the other hand, I don't think that systemd is useful, but I also don't care about what nightmares Linux gets from the administrative point of view (because I am a FreeBSD user). I also left the Gnome world after I noticed how it the software project is being handled (getting more and more unportable and dependent on Linux) and gradually found my way to Openbox and now to Xmonad where the UX is only limited by my imagination capabilities.
As you can see, UX is highly dependent on the user. The common desktop environments have a really shitty UX (from my point of view), because I cannot get them to do what I easily can do with Xmonad. Other users will get confused by Xmonad and think that it has a terrible UX (which will be mostly "true", also for you as a researcher, because you think that UX is not something that you are responsible to develop, but the desktop environment should provide it for the average dumb user out there).
A sysadmin, but doesnt know what fundamental datatype strings are stored as or what ASCII is?
What is the world coming to :(
*reading from a deb 7.6 laptop on gnome 3* uhm... what was it before if they're switching to gnome? o.O
Exactly. Linux would need stability and not this constant change for change's sake.
If you want systemd - great, make it an option. After a couple of versions, when the bugs have been worked out, make it the default if it really offers an advantage, but not before.
I had a lot of broken scripts in the bash to dash transition. But that is also a reason NOT to change too much and NOT to switch to systemd any time soon.
How many other audio systems can you mention in Linux which seamlessly allowed you to add devices to an audio stream, hot plug blue-tooth headsets, or change destinations of streams without interrupting them?
None, but nobody except a tiny group of people ever needed anything like that. There would have been nothing wrong in just supporting pulseaudio for those that need it and keep the working ALSA for the default until pulseaudio is debugged. And only when you have a couple of years of stability make it the default. But no, we can't have that. No, everybody had to make it the default as soon as they could - and of course I was also bitten (several times) by pulseaudio. And I had no alternative because all wanted to be part of the herd.
This herd-mentality is really the problem with Linux nowadays. In *theory* we could have many different distributions - from cutting-edge to conservative. But in the real world we have a group of lemmings that compete on who is the first to jump on the latest untested feature.
For example: On one computer I used debian lenny for many years and now I wanted to upgrade. Tried the new debian - hangs on shut-down. Tried SuSE - hangs on shut-down. Tried Mint - hangs on shut-down.
You see what I mean? They are all the same - and that sucks.
Fork less, patch more! That is really all that needs to be said about Linux. All of the top 10 distros have incredibly bad version stability compared to other *nix's.
As I understand it, XFCE worked out just fine.
Debian 7 Fast and Rock Solid Stable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG8ZSpUOJuw
So why switch, and go with a total POS like Gnome3?
Along time ago, I came to the conclusion that, for me at least, there is no perfect solution for the linux desktop! I had to put together my own consortium of applications until I found something that fit my individual needc. So far that has been openbox + pcmanfm desktop + lxpanel + docky + xcompmgr. I could not be happier and the kde and gnome apps I depend on work much faster, with less issue.
Resolution:
- apt-get purge gnome*
- apt-get install lxde
Say hello to a perfectly functioning desktop that doesnt need a supercomputer.
As I understand it, XFCE worked out just fine.
Debian 7 Fast and Rock Solid Stable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
GNOME 3.4 is default in Debian 7. Xfce has only been the default on testing.
So why switch, and go with a total POS like Gnome3?
There are many reasons. Like for example accessibility features, more reliable upstream releases and better systemd integration.
I always considered the diversity of the Linux ecosystem its greatest asset, and the primary reason for its success--everyone had a reason to use it since you could adapt it to do whatever you wanted. That encouraged motivated and passionate people to make it what it is today. The homogenisation of Linux distributions championed by systemd is IMO one of the most foolish mistakes that could be made. Sounds good if you're a corporate drone who just deploys pre-canned applications all day long, but it's the beginning of the end for doing novel, interesting and unusal stuff with Linux, and ultimately that will affect the corporate drones as well once the people who were doing the development work move on to something else.
I would say that there are some extremely bad and troubling design elements at play *if* indeed the initial process is now dictating the graphical desktop. Does upstart or openrc have this issue? Yes, initd was old and needed to be replaced, but it had already been satisfactorily replaced on many distros with upstart, which also provided backwards compatibility and didn't take over your entire system in onerous ways.
I switched to Debian to get away from the Gnome 3 craziness. To learn that they're making it the default is depressing but, as you rightly point out, it should be simple to install an alternative. Even if it's simple to install an alternative, though, I still think I'll stick with Wheezy Stable and XFCE for as long as i possibly can. Car analogy: I don't have to think hard about driving because it's become second nature and I can get from A to B easily, but some people seem to think the brake pedal should be in a different place and make me learn a new way. No thanks. Donning my tinfoil hat, I really do wonder if closed source vendors have installed sleepers in various distros to mess things around.
Ah, the nostalgia of Windows ME
None, but nobody except a tiny group of people ever needed anything like that.
Ahh the old we know better than the users line.
Users who use teleconferencing apps, or god forbid something as simple as skype. My technophobe mother does this too. Then there's every computer at work which comes with a USB headset incase we need to do an online meeting or something. God forbid I actually want to play a computer game and plug in my headset mid game because someone next door started building and my teammates are sick if hearing a circular saw come through the mic.
No use cases, none what so ever clearly.
As a side note, YOU are the reason it will never be the year of Linux on desktop.
Theres no such thing as a "text" datatype on computer systems. Every piece of data in your computer is binary.
The people in this thread are blowing my mind with their ignorance and / or obstinance.
Mysql is for people who occassionally like to use data, so funny you picked that for example.
My statement applies to all database systems, you gonna mock those too? Perhaps you could drop google or microsoft a line and let them know about your new, non-binary computer data storage system.
Nonsense.
In fact I had to deinstall pulseaudio to make Skype work - on several different distributions. That was the only way because pulseaudio just didn't work. For a long time the audio-quality was also bad (had a lot of hickups and cracks). I also know (you obviously don't) that the pulseaudio-team refused to work on many problems because the drivers (which worked perfectly with ALSA) were somehow flawed. Now maybe they were flawed, but they worked with ALSA and if they don't work with pulseaudio then ALSA is still better no matter how many features pulseaudio may offer.
The distributions *should* be the advocates of the users. But they are not. They are advocates of the developers who obviously always want the latest/greatest.
When your mother tells you that she has cracking in the sound that makes it unusable, do you tell her "hey, just uninstall pulseaudio and enable ALSA"? Is that user-friendly? Or do you tell her "You are the reason that there will never be the year of the Linux desktop, the cracks are a product of your imagination"?
You quite obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Especially about Skype which took forever to work with pulseaudio. Especially Skype. God I remember hours of getting Skype to work with (or in fact without because uninstalling did the job) pulseaudio.
As I said, the way to go would have been to include pulseaudio and let those that need the advanced features use it. And then, after it became stable, then make it the default.
But that didn't happen. They just jumped on pulseaudio years before it was ready.
And that is the problem: You and all the other upgrade-fanatics consider the users just worthless beta-testers without any rights whatsoever.
...Frankly, I'm bored with the breakages & the hoops I had to go through to get everything working, so I back on good old Mint 17 & Cinnamon because finally Clem's cottoned onto the fact we wanted Mint with LTS support! I still love the customisation side of KDE, coz you can truly make it your own, but it is nowhere near as polished as the latest iteration of Gnome or indeed Cinnamon and lightweight, KDE defintely isn't...
The better SystemD integration is a bit rich as it feels like the reason Debian went to SystemD was as a favor/benefit to GNOME. GNOME needs SystemD lets default to it, now we need to default to GNOME because it has the best SystemD integration.
based on accessibility and systemd integration, along with a host of other reasons; mainly political.
FUck you, I miss physical keyboards on phones...
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.