Slashdot Mirror
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 .
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 !
Gnome is drastically different than any other environment out there. I can't imagine it being a good choice for noobs. MATE is a better choice because it is more familiar to Windows users. Unity is a good choice for Mac OS X users because of some similarities. GNOME is like neither. A noob would be lost.
Why on earth would you do that?
Much fear I sense in you...
Help you we can. Install FreeBSD we must.
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.
Come, join us, Cinnamon is what you want.
Why KDE? KDE sucks for noobs and oldfags alike. Gnome is still better, and a simple text console is the best.
Then man up and run slack.
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.
It's definitely one of the cleanest. It needs a rewrite, though.
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 think you got that backwards. Canonical started using systemd because Debian picked it. Also, Canonical doesn't do Gnome3 shell on their main offering, so how do you see any strongarming in this decision?
Unity is a good choice for Mac OS X users because of some similarities.
Clearly you've never used OS X for any amount of time to make such a ridiculous claim. Unity is almost nothing like OS X beyond a couple of superficial similarities that, outside of the left hand buttons, don't even functionally act the same as the OS X counterpart it is trying to mimic. Long-time OS X users tend to despise Unity for its superficial cargo cult look.
KDE has features that Gnome has refused to implement. Gnome 3 promised Kiosk features similar to what KDE has had since version 2.0, never happened. They refuse to allow root access to the Window manager, and sometimes it's needed (CAD/CAE applications). To top all that off, it's far less flexible than KDE.
Desktop control is required in some environments, which rules out all of the Linux desktops except for KDE. So maybe for you KDE sucks, but from a enterprise and compliance perspective it's both exceptional and essential.
Further, I have had better experiences with KDE all the way around. I don't have issues controlling menus, location of "start" items, window tiling, multiple displays and desktops, sounds, or any of the other areas where Gnome and Unity are both problematic and inferior in my experience. KDE's speed has always been better than Gnome as well. I'm sure my hardware selection plays a role in that, so again your experiences may differ from mine.
You can claim that emacs is better than vi just like you can claim that Gnome is better than KDE. Different people have different experiences, and will claim the opposite. Neither side is wrong necessarily.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Are there noobs left in the world?
For some reason some people keep creating new ones.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
That is why a certain navel gazing tard with no engineering sense or real world experience, with a long and tragic history of failures and of fucking up GNU/Linux, decided the headless server realm needed a good fucking up too, and so he wrote systemd
I don't understand what you mean by desktop control and root access.
Care elaborating?
You need to look into it deeper. It didn't happen that way at all.
Canonical wanted Debian to pick upstart (naturally as it was their software). Once Debian chose systemd though and with RHEL already switching away from upstart to systemd, Canonical felt that being left as the only distro still using upstart wasn't tenable any more. Staying aligned with Debian was more important than getting what they wanted.
I've used OS X for 4-5 years and have used Unity since it came out, and I find them very similar. There's differences, but they're much more like each other than they're like Windows. My wife, who isn't a computer person and has always used Macs, occasionally uses Unity on my laptop, and finds it almost the same as Mac except the colors are different.
Jeff
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
There are also no desktop effects.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Desktop effects are the second thing I turn off in a new install, the first being those fscking bongos.
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?