Debian Now Defaults To Xfce On Non-x86 Desktops

[drago01]

If it only works with x86 drivers,

Wrong.

if it only work with systemd...

Wrong.

what kind of rubbish is that

A conclusion drawn from two wrong statements is per definiton also wrong

[grege]

This highlights the Archilles' Heal of ARM. Video drivers. I have a Cubiebord2 with an Allwinner A20 and Mali 400 graphics. It happily runs Debian Wheezy with accelerated graphics and a Mate desktop. This is the Debian X image created by a talented developer.

But, and it is a big but - it is frozen with a 3.4 kernel and two year old xorg. Try installing Jessie or Ubuntu 14.04. No problems as long as you still want a 3.4 kernel. Accelerated graphics? Forget it because the non-free drivers are dependency locked in the past. It is the GMA500 debacle all over again. Yes, some clever people manage to get the old drivers running on 14.04 by carefully managing the various package versions. But this should not be necessary. Until you can just install the latest kernel and have it work without mucking about then ARM desktops are simply not worth the effort. I accept running a normal desktop on a device like this is not really its reason for existence, but the problems highlight the weakness of the platform.

The day of the ARM desktop computer is a long way off, if ever. Maybe someone with deep pockets like Samsung can provide Exynos drivers and regularly update with new versions. But what is really needed is opensource drivers. Freedreno and Limadriver are fantastic efforts and I watch their progress with interest waiting for the day when I can apt-get install xorg-video-limadriver

Whether Debian defaults to Xfce, Mate or LXQT matter little when none of them work properly anyway. For what it is worth I have a 14.04 installation with unaccelerated Xfce4 running on the Cubie as well. Xfce4 is as good a default as any, at least it loads.

[dungeon]

That bug report is useless. "I tested it and it doesn't work" does not provide any information to draw conclusion from.

"I tested it and it crashes here is the backtrace ..."
"I tested it and it hits an assert [...]" ...

is way more useful.

As for "non crappy driver" ... a driver that provides hardware 3D and does not crash when you actually try to use it.

With that analogy crappy DE is Gnome . If it only works with x86 drivers, if it only work with systemd... what kind of rubbish is that

[My8th]

This is due to the systemd fiasco, and the stubbornness of defaulting to gnome3. No systemd in other architectures, therefore no gnome3.

And you wonder why people want to fork. Hope they get the bashing they deserve.

Do they plan on porting systemd to other architectures?

[Artemis3]

This is due to the systemd fiasco, and the stubbornness of defaulting to gnome3. No systemd in other architectures, therefore no gnome3.

And you wonder why people want to fork. Hope they get the bashing they deserve.

[prodigy_]

More good news.

Next necessary steps:
1) Returning Xfce (or MATE) as default DE for x86.
2) Making systemd non-default.

And things will finally be back to normal.

[ferry]

If they want something with good accessibility, that also scales to different levels of graphics hardware, why didn't they just go with the latest KDE Plasma 4 desktop?
I always used Debian with KDE back in the KDE3 / pre-Kubuntu days.

Me too. When there is no opengl it will use xrender and still present a decent desktop. I have kde4 even working on a raspberry pi, a FitPC (without GPU acceleration/opengl) and all my other desktops.

I don't see why kde is just being ignored, while it really is the best solution solution for non-geeks, looking a lot like windows7 (or is that vice versa?).

For geeks I would recommend ssh, which works on the intel edisson and other hardware without display.

[lunarcloud]

Why not Plasma?

If they want something with good accessibility, that also scales to different levels of graphics hardware, why didn't they just go with the latest KDE Plasma 4 desktop?
I always used Debian with KDE back in the KDE3 / pre-Kubuntu days.

[drago01]

Did you read bug report?

That bug report is useless. "I tested it and it doesn't work" does not provide any information to draw conclusion from.

"I tested it and it crashes here is the backtrace ..."
"I tested it and it hits an assert [...]" ...

is way more useful.

As for "non crappy driver" ... a driver that provides hardware 3D and does not crash when you actually try to use it.

[Ardje]

I hope GNOME 3 works with ARM devices with support for OpenGL.

It works probably great on ARM devices with OpenGL.
Just ARM devices with OpenGL do not exist (yet?).

Anyway: enlightenment should works with opengles and wayland. As that is the base of tizen it gets a lot of vendor updates.
But it seems I am about the only one in the Debian/Ubuntu world using enlightenment. And packaging enlightenment is not that simple :-(.