Debian Trying Out Xfce Over GNOME By Default

[stqn]

Thunar (Xfce?s file manager) and Mousepad (Xfce?s text editor) are both very good. No need to spread FUD?

[Ericg]

What a farce. Lets change the default desktop without looking at the stats, but then offer to use the stats later to determine if it was a good choice. Thanks for the goodwill Debian.

They wanna see how many people go out of their way to install Gnome vs how many people are perfectly fine with XFCE and stick with it.

[verde]

Best move they could do...

[Daktyl198]

Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3. It doesn't magically have more or less requirements than GNOME 3.

Except that Cinnamon, MAGICALLY, doesn't require Systemd...
Cinnamon is a complete fork of about the 3.6 release of Gnome3. It is no longer a shell on top of it anymore. And I can almost guarantee it won't depend on Systemd.

P.S. Xfce is a really great DE as well, I was just mentioning something with a bit more up-to-date compatibility. I use Xfce and Cinnamon on and off, myself.

[schmidtbag]

What a farce. Lets change the default desktop without looking at the stats, but then offer to use the stats later to determine if it was a good choice. Thanks for the goodwill Debian.

Yeah, because GNOME 3 really proved to be a good default environment *sarcasm*. GNOME 3 and Unity are of the 2 worst DEs to be used as the default.

XFCE is much better than GNOME 3 for Debian's default - it's much more light-weight (in terms of CPU, GPU, RAM, and HDD consumption), it works on legacy systems, its interface is much more familiar to Windows and Mac users, and it doesn't update often. Not updating often is important for debian, since they're not a cutting edge distro (even sid is a bit on the old side) and they look for stability, which XFCE is. I don't get the impression GNOME 3 is a buggy mess anymore, but it still updates often enough to be stable Fallback mode basically is XFCE but incredibly limited.

[schmidtbag]

Thunar (Xfce?s file manager) and Mousepad (Xfce?s text editor) are both very good. No need to spread FUD?

Thunar and Mousepad work well but that's just because they're annoyingly simple. Both of them are (or were, until pretty recently) like Explorer and Notepad in Windows XP, which is really embarrassing for linux users. In most ways, vi is better than Mousepad. It took way too long for Thunar to get tabbed browsing.

On my laptop, I personally use Thunar, because its just barely good enough; I don't do enough file related tasks to need something better, but I've been very close to switching to something else.

[shmerl]

I feel like KDE on Debian requires more polishing. Many things don't work out of the box easily.

[mrugiero]

Thunar (Xfce?s file manager) and Mousepad (Xfce?s text editor) are both very good. No need to spread FUD?

Well, Mousepad could be seen as lacking in features by some. Thunar works really great for me. Mousepad, if it were to have a tabbed interface it would suit me perfectly for common text files. For reading code, however, it would be good to have syntax highlighting (I use gedit for this).

Thunar and Mousepad work well but that's just because they're annoyingly simple. Both of them are (or were, until pretty recently) like Explorer and Notepad in Windows XP, which is really embarrassing for linux users. In most ways, vi is better than Mousepad. It took way too long for Thunar to get tabbed browsing.

On my laptop, I personally use Thunar, because its just barely good enough; I don't do enough file related tasks to need something better, but I've been very close to switching to something else.

Alright. So there should not be any "ridiculously simple" apps on Linux, or their users should feel embarrassed. It's good to know.
Seriously, if we are going to be elitist, the CLI is usually more powerful for any kind of complex file management. Thunar is supposed to just be a simple tool, and user friendly (this includes newbie friendly). I agree that the tabbed interface is almost a must have, though, but I find Nautilus to have superfluous features I never use, for example.

[stqn]

Thunar and Mousepad work well but that's just because they're annoyingly simple. Both of them are (or were, until pretty recently) like Explorer and Notepad in Windows XP, which is really embarrassing for linux users. In most ways, vi is better than Mousepad. It took way too long for Thunar to get tabbed browsing.

I haven?t tried other file managers recently, but I like the powerful multiple rename feature of Thunar, that I can add custom actions, set it to single-click, and that it remembers the position in previously visited directories. I?ve never needed tabs but they are available now anyway. I don?t find it annoyingly simple or embarrassing at all. The one thing that used to cause problems is Tumbler (the thumbnail generator) so I uninstalled it long ago? I don?t know if it has been fixed.

Mousepad can syntax-highlight source code and is really easy to use (unlike vi). It is IMO a perfect default editor to open text documents.

[stqn]

Mousepad, if it were to have a tabbed interface it would suit me perfectly for common text files. For reading code, however, it would be good to have syntax highlighting (I use gedit for this).

Mousepad 0.3 has syntax highlighting and tabs.