Debian Switches Back To GNOME As Its Default Desktop

[berarma]

Not just accessibility

Depressing how accessibility concerns are largely ignored by this thread.

Accessibility, security, stability, functionality, integration, ease-of-use,... Most XFCE advocates seem to ignore all of these. The simple desktops have their audience and are very useful at certain situations, but it's not a serious option for a default desktop in Debian. Anyone wanting that kind of desktop has enough knowledge to install it themselves, no need to make it difficult and painful for new and non-technically oriented users. The decission made by the release team without asking anyone seems an intent to create controversy that news websites picked up fast.

[carewolf]

Depressing how accessibility concerns are largely ignored by this thread.

Depressing how Debian doesn't know how to measure accesibility. They just looked at ONE api mainly used by blind people, and then concluded the desktops that support that API are the only ones accesible. Ridiculous, especially since they are testing for GNOME API and considers anything not supporting the GNOME API for accesibily non-accesible. Yeah. If you are not GNOME you are not accesibly according to Debian because they are measuing it based on whether you are GNOME or not.

[johnc]

...forced into it by systemd...

[rikkinho]

i agree

I wish Debian switched to Unity as its default desktop.

i agree, unity is much better than gnome, gnome crash a lot with games when you minimize from fullscreen

[dungeon]

I mainly use Debian's mini.iso for installation and go to expert to install base, from there i go to manual settings and installation because and i am not satisfied with any DE bloat - that is i think accesibility for experienced users

[zog6]

I still use XFCE occasionally, but its development has been slow for a long time now the devs seem to like it that way. They'd probably argue that stability is a virtue and not be totally wrong about it.

This is a feature, not a bug. I'm fed up with useful stuff suddenly vanishing in GUIS because some developer decided everyone didnt need it. I have XFCE on all my desktop machines and the intense frustration with Gnome/KDE/Unity/whatever has vanished.

[anda_skoa]

I mainly use Debian's mini.iso for installation and go to expert to install base, from there i go to manual settings and installation because and i am not satisfied with any DE bloat - that is i think accesibility for experienced users

That's the way I even install my DE systems.
There is simply no point in installing all the UI packages from disk just to have them replaces immediately by the upgrade following the installation.

Cheers,
_

[dungeon]

That's the way I even install my DE systems.
There is simply no point in installing all the UI packages from disk just to have them replaces immediately by the upgrade following the installation.

Cheers,
_

Yeah even default Debian image is multiarch netinstall image with no DEs packages at all in it, but OK full blown images are usefull for people with no internet connection or at least for someone who does not have it (for various reasons) at least at install time or at all

[Kraut]

Accessibility, security, stability, functionality, integration, ease-of-use,... Most XFCE advocates seem to ignore all of these.

bullshit-bingo?

, no need to make it difficult and painful for new and non-technically oriented users.

We still do talk about debian, are we?

This is a feature, not a bug. I'm fed up with useful stuff suddenly vanishing in GUIS because some developer decided everyone didnt need it. I have XFCE on all my desktop machines and the intense frustration with Gnome/KDE/Unity/whatever has vanished.

Indeed! I was using icewm until I got to xfce because all the other desktop interfaces where a disappointment in load time/resource hunger/crash bugs. Not need to even talking about unity...
There is still very useful stuff coming out of them. For example I heavily use kfind and kwrite. (or k3b when I still was burning CDs)

Xfce for me hat far fewer bugs then I ever had in any other environment like kde or gnome. And I used xfce for a way longer time now.
I think xfce would be better. But gnome is still a better default then kde.

[Kite]

i agree, unity is much better than gnome, gnome crash a lot with games when you minimize from fullscreen

Fascinating. I mean, I don't use "minimize" and never bothered to enable it, so I honestly don't know whether GNOME has problems with minimizing games, but one of the reasons I swapped from Unity to GNOME was the fact that Unity would constantly break just about any game I'd play.

A notification, the game's graphics rendering breaks. Move mouse to left side of screen, the Launcher tries to appear, and graphics rendering breaks. Accidentally hit Super, the dash appears and graphics rendering breaks. Alt-tab, graphics rendering breaks. Unity crashes in the background, gets reloaded, and graphics rendering breaks -- though the fact that a crash was only a barely noticable issue for *ordinary* applications was a genuinely impressive workaround (given, it is a problem that should have never existed in the first place).

I've seen a single issue playing games in any version of GNOME Shell on Debian testing -- that moving the mouse to the corner or the bottom edge can open the Activities or Notification bar (respectively), neither disrupting or crashing (or even affecting) the game -- which is furthermore easily disabled using Shell extensions. Since fixing that, gaming on GNOME Shell in Debian has been unparalleled. On the *other* hand, it is also important to note that Canonical's version of GNOME Shell is, as I recall, completely messed up (because that's just how they roll) and had many of the same issues as Unity; I'm just noting that when you use a version of GNOME that hasn't (apparently) been sabotaged by a thousand shoddy hackjobs to its libraries, it does, in fact, actually work pretty well.