
Debian: Change default desktop to xfce - r0muald
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=commitdiff;h=dfca406eb694e0ac00ea04b12fc912237e01c9b5
======
bjourne
I was genuinely surprised that the diff was so small. It's a sign of a a well
written and factored system. In more average codebases big changes like that
would likely require changes in multiple places and also cascade changes to
related modules.

~~~
r0muald
Finally someone who understands the beauty of this instead of "my favourite DE
is ..."!

This, coupled with the detailed explanation and rationale for the change, the
explicit deadline, seems to me like an exemplar of good practice for free
software community projects. It is not surprising that this came at a time
when Debian is also discussing init systems, and hopefully the same well-
thought approach will work there too. And that matters not just for Debian but
for all distros IMHO, because it sets a precedent of how you do these things
without fucking up your userbase and/or your developers.

~~~
bloodorange
Indeed. It's a good example of how software should be built and set up.

------
keithpeter
_" Hello to all the tech journalists out there. This is pretty boring. Why
don't you write a story about monads instead?"_

Brought a smile to my face.

Posting this from a Wheezy/non-free install on a recycled Thinkpad X60 with
1Gb of RAM. This laptop manufactured in December 2006 will _run_ Gnome OK but
there are issues about scrolling large documents in LibreOffice and general
responsiveness that bring me back to XFCE.

Surely Jessie defaults at this stage are mainly for those testing the
installer?

------
davidw
I finally switched to xfce because it does things how I want, rather than how
the Gnome or Unity people think I should have them set up. Maybe those are
better for end user type people, but... that's not me.

~~~
mistercow
You're lucky that there's _any_ desktop environment that does things how you
want. I haven't found one yet, but xfce with compiz and a lot of customization
gets close.

~~~
lelandbatey
For me, I run XFCE with Xmonad as the WM. It's all sorts of awesome, letting
me best use each of my screens. I've found it very customizable and awesome.

What are the things you're looking for in a desktop environment?

~~~
mistercow
Basically what I want is Unity's task switcher (I know, everyone hates it, but
for me it is almost exactly how I like it), KDE's system settings, and xfce's
everything else (except Thunar; but using Nautilus under xfce is easy enough).

------
talles
YES. I often play around with different desktops (xmonad <3) but I always end
up in XFCE.

In the past I end up in Gnome 2, but now XFCE is my all purpose desktop.

I don't really like KDE 4, Gnome 3 or Unity (hey it's my opnion, mmkay). XFCE
is the big guy left. The others feel exotic, new or just not stable enough
(like cinnamon). XFCE seems a perfect match for Debian.

~~~
nawitus
I switched to LXDE after years of XFCE. Seems faster and does everything I
need well. Worth a look.

~~~
a3n
I switched to LXDE instead of XFCE from the impending Unity that Ubuntu was
going to give me. XFCE had historically been my go-to lightweight, but when I
tried it a couple years ago it "felt" a little heavy and a little slow
compared to LXDE. Actually Lubuntu vs Xubuntu.

I may give XFCE a try again when I move upstream to Debian. That'll be
sometime this year I think.

------
moreentropy
I can honestly say that I'm generally very happy and productive with Gnome 3.
It looks and feels way better than Unity.

With Gnome 3 I can launch, place, and switch all applications with a few
keystrokes and without touching the mouse at all, all while "normal" people
can still use the very same configuration. I like that it's basically just an
unobstrusive shell to launch and switch applications.

People always complain that Linux desktops just mimic Windows 95, now that
Gnome has done something entirely new (and good!), people complain that it's
different to what they're used to.

~~~
josteink
_With Gnome 3 I can launch, place, and switch all applications with a few
keystrokes and without touching the mouse at all, all while "normal" people
can still use the very same configuration. I like that it's basically just an
unobstrusive shell to launch and switch applications._

OK. So basically just what Unity does then?

Not trying to belittle your comment or anything, but had you not prefixed your
comment "With Gnome 3 I can", I would just have assumed you just described
Unity. Because Unity does all that very well too.

So what's different about it? What makes it better?

~~~
moreentropy
I haven't really used Unity apart from launching a terminal and a browser on
someone else's desktop. Unity and Gnome 3 seem very similar, both visually and
by paradigm. I guess Unity is a brainchild of Ubuntu's NIH attitude.

Personally as a Gnome 3 user, when having to use Unity i got annoyed because
my muscle memory keystrokes didn't work as expected (hit win, type "term" hit
return, hit win-uparrow, expect a fullscreen terminal), but there's no point
in expecting Unity to behave exactly like Gnome 3, I'm sure a similar workflow
exists in Unity.

~~~
phaemon
> hit win, type "term" hit return, hit win-uparrow, expect a fullscreen
> terminal

Unity version: hit win, type "term" hit return, hit F11, expect a fullscreen
terminal

~~~
SkyMarshal
Also: hit win, type "term", hit return, hit alt-space x, expect a fullscreen
terminal.

~~~
Paul_S
Don't want to come across smug but in Awesome and many other tiling WM:

meta+Enter

That's it, your fullscreen terminal is there.

~~~
mh-
hmm, also in Windows 95.

~~~
Paul_S
That's blatantly not true. You have to press: ctrl+esc, up arrow, enter, c, m,
d, enter, alt+m, enter (or something along those lines) And in the end I'm
pretty sure the windows command prompt doesn't allow you to maximise it
because it can't adapt to the changing line and row number.

Also how do you get Windows 95 to manage your X session? ;) Seriously though,
we're all talking about Linux here.

edit: I understand your confusion now, I think you failed to realise that
meta+enter also opens the said terminal

~~~
mh-
_I think you failed to realise that meta+enter also opens the said terminal_

ah yes, didn't know that. was referring to full-screening.

------
tehwalrus
I've been using XFCE on debian for ages. I just ran installs of two other
Linuxes with Gnome 3 and KDE 4, just to check...and to be honest, I'm happy
with XFCE.

~~~
IsTom
I've been on XFCE on Debian since KDE 4 came out. Recently I had a fresh
install and checked gnome out of curiosity and it turns out I'm too old-
fashioned for this.

~~~
ihsw
KDE4 came out a long time ago, back then 4.0 was derided as a beta-quality
clusterfuck but it's come a long way.

~~~
darkandbrooding
This past weekend I installed KDE 4.10 on a FreeBSD 9.2 vm using the new
"pkgng" tools. Completely painless. KDE 4.10 is very polished.

------
r0muald
To be honest I don't care too much about the default desktop, but I think this
commit message is particularly well-written and leaves little room for the
(inevitable?) flame-wars about the topic. The closing sentence got me
laughing.

~~~
Filligree
Why are CD images still so popular?

My last few computers have only included CD drives for the purpose of booting
installers that are inconvenient to put on USB. USB drives, on the other hand,
are quite universal.

~~~
dlitz
Debian's CD images are actually hybrid CD/DVD/USB images:
[http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s03.html.en](http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s03.html.en)

It's been a feature of isolinux for a while now:
[http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc/isolinux#HYBRID_C...](http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc/isolinux#HYBRID_CD-
ROM.2FHARD_DISK_MODE)

~~~
pippy
Every single Debian USB image I've tried to flash with dd has failed in the
last few years. I have to boot up a windows virtual machine and use LinuxLive
USB Creator to create one.

It's odd as the RaspberryPi debian image works perfectly fine.

~~~
dlitz
That's odd. It should be fine, but here are some things to check:

\- Make sure that none of the filesystems on the USB stick are mounted before
you begin. Otherwise, the filesystem drivers might corrupt something.

\- Use a larger block size that's a power of 2 (e.g. bs=4096k). The default is
512 bytes, which is too small. This should just speed things up, but using
writes that are smaller than the actual flash erase blocks can cause a lot of
extra erases, and maybe your flash stick breaks when you do that.

\- Run 'sync' after using dd, and wait for disk activity to finish. dd doesn't
flush to disk by default.

\- Don't use an amd64 image on a 32-bit machine. Don't use ia64 on a 64-bit
PC.

\- Try using synchronized I/O:

    
    
        sudo dd if=debian-7.2.0-i386-CD-1.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=4096k oflag=sync

~~~
pippy
Thanks, I'll come back and read this next time I do it. The first thing I
checked was the bit length, though it could be the file system type or the
synchronized io

------
bovermyer
My problem with xfce and most other Linux desktops is that they look like a
Windows desktop from the early 2000s. It's an aesthetic that I don't
personally enjoy; I'm much more of a shiny/fancy user, which is why I like
Aero, or to a lesser extent, Mac OS X.

I suppose that's part of why I don't bother with GUIs on *nix systems.

~~~
Nursie
Look at Xubuntu. It looks nothing like older windows.

You can apply themes to xfce that make it look just as modern as anything
else. Debian tend not to go in for applying sparkle to their default installs,
so try not to judge based on their defaults.

~~~
scott_karana
Since we're talking about DEs, and not distributions, could you let us know
what theme Xubuntu uses?

I don't think many of us have the commitment to install another distro just to
try out an xfce skin... :(

~~~
Nursie
LOL, sure, should have mentioned rather than just asserting and running
away...

IIRC Xubuntu (or at least the last Xubuntu install I used) has 'greybird' as
its default theme.

On debian you'll want to install the "murrine-themes" package to get this and
a whole load of others. To change Xfce themes completely it seems you need to
go into settings->Appearance _and_ settings->Window Manager, which is a bit
clunky.

I'm not going to say it's the most awesome thing in the world EVAR, but after
years of Gnome 2 and 'clearlooks', it's refreshing.

~~~
scott_karana
Thanks!

------
maaarghk
Just my opinion - I think this is insane. I literally cannot believe a massive
distro like Debian has decided to switch defaults to such an ugly and outdated
DE when Gnome is doing such good work switching to Wayland so they can support
more than just desktops. Meanwhile Xfce devs are all "X works fine so why
switch to Wayland?" as if there aren't a million great reasons. This is the
sort of decision that causes people to joke about how we'll never see the year
of the Linux desktop.

~~~
computer
Ugly and outdated? I use the theme from Xubuntu [1] and there's nothing
outdated about it, besides not being adjusted for tablets.

[1]
[http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/199/e/d/xubuntu_13_04...](http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/199/e/d/xubuntu_13_04_default_theme_by_gridcube-d6e1u9l.png)

~~~
maaarghk
It uses X. That itself is outdated before I start talking about out of date
design principles.

I personally don't like the black menu bar, I don't like the big childish
icons, I don't like the slate gray gradient window box and I don't like the UI
design's 2000s take on Finder. It's just not pretty in my opinion. And that
does count to me, and probably the majority of end users too.

~~~
homeomorphic
> It uses X. That itself is outdated before I start talking about out of date
> design principles.

All major window managers and desktop enivornments use X today. Some, such as
KDE, Gnome and Enlightenment have begun work towards becoming Wayland
compositors, and their underlying GUI libraries (Qt, GTK, and so on) towards
supporting Wayland instead of X. However, you'll be hard pressed to find any
significant number of them running on anything but X _today_.

I too want Wayland to succeed and take over for X, and when that day comes,
XFCE should hopefully be ready for it. Complaining that XFCE uses X today,
though, makes no sense.

> I personally don't like the black menu bar, I don't like the big childish
> icons, I don't like the slate gray gradient window box and I don't like the
> UI design's 2000s take on Finder. It's just not pretty in my opinion.

This, it seems to me, is just an expression of your personal taste. While that
certainly matters do yourself, it doesn't really bring much to the discussion.

------
jw_
I'd somehow mistakenly dismissed XFCE as being "too fiddly" years ago, but
I've recently switched to it and I love it. It's like a saner, more
configurable GNOME 2.6 with pleasant defaults.

------
asveikau
Does anyone use the Debian default desktop? I always figure it to be a distro
whose users prefer to customize. I personally tend to set it up with the
netinst image, with no GUI, then install a WM and set up ~/.xsession
manually..

~~~
tehwalrus
The desktop is pretty much the only thing I bother to customise when
installing a distro. (that and maybe partitions, if it's not in a VM.)

------
yati
I'm running XFCE on a 4 years old laptop with 1 GB RAM. GNOME and KDE aren't
even options here, but XFCE is beautiful, efficient, fast and never makes me
feel the laptop is so old.

~~~
stolio
Yeah. I run old hardware and when I switched from Xfce to Openbox because
"it's lighter" I almost fell out of my chair when I realized my Openbox system
was using twice the resources. Of course it was my fault and I changed it up
(no more compositing!) but I gained a lot of respect for Xfce in that process.

Also when building a DE from scratch it's nice to know that any of the Xfce
pieces will 'just work'.

------
mmgutz
If you guys like Debian and want a beatiful, fast DE and WM try Crunchbang.
Used to be an Ubuntu and Mint guy. Even tried Xubuntu. I settled on
Crunchbang, based on openbox, mainly because it is easy to configure, sensible
out of the box and is even faster than XFCE distributions.

Here's a screenshot with WebStorm, gVim and Terminator which can split panes
(although I use tmux most of the time).

[http://imgur.com/nL4VGH4](http://imgur.com/nL4VGH4)

That's my custom theme. The default theme is beautiful too.

------
davidgerard
Make it less bloody ugly. I was horrified how awful Xfce looked in Wheezy
compared to Ubuntu Quantal. So wish Xfce would upstream the Xubuntu changes.

------
smegel
It was the switch to Gnome3 that drove me to CentOS...although I'm not sure
xfce would be enough to make me want to go back.

~~~
toupeira
Well there's nothing stopping you from using any desktop environment you want
on pretty much any distro, this is just about the default choice on a new
installation.

------
staz
* The state of accessability support, particularly for the blind.

it's kind of sad, Gnome was reputed for it's accessibility support

~~~
varikin
I think what is trying to be said is that they have to evaluate accessibility
support for both Xfce and Gnome3 before finalizing this decision. Gnome is (or
was?) reputed for this as you say, and must be part of the decision to switch
away.

------
caycep
Why not LXDE? I've been putting that on my debian VM's when I need a GUI, it
seems reasonable.

~~~
vacri
I can't speak for Debian, but for my money, XFCE is more integrated, LXDE
isn't. SSH agents aren't installed, for example, and aren't trivial to
manually install. Looking for LXDE help has you palmed off to Openbox as often
as not. I think LXDE looks better - XFCE looks coarse and ungainly, but there
is better integration. Still not perfect, but if it's moved to be the debian
default, there will be more eyes on it.

~~~
caycep
Is the XFCE/xubuntu community more active? I suppose that plays a big role on
how much ongoing development activity there is...

~~~
davidgerard
The Xfce forum is helpful, and they do happily answer Xubuntu questions.
(Frequently the answer is "yeah, pull that in from GNOME" or "that hasn't been
written yet, please do!" but that's fair enough in many cases ;-)

------
tlongren
This is awesome and I hope XFCE remains the default. I will love and use
debian forever, either way.

------
cunning1460
xfce4 is a good choice for Debian it is lightweight and easy to use. KDE4 is
probably the best desktop on Linux right now, but it's too resource hungry to
be the default Debian environment, imho.

~~~
adrianlmm
"KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now"

I strongly dissagree.

~~~
Zardoz84
""KDE4 is probably the best desktop on Linux right now" I strongly dissagree."
I strongly disagree with you. KDE is not perfect but at least gives freedom to
customize it a lot, and without need to swing in config files.

~~~
adrianlmm
Configurability doesn't make it better, in the contrary, it has to many vane
options to my taste.

~~~
Zardoz84
But at least, configuration makes you free. KDE don't make you slave of his
"vision" tm

~~~
adrianlmm
I've never had that "vision" problem with other desktops, what you say is just
your own opinión, nothing else.

~~~
davidgerard
I remember when I tried GNOME 3 in Debian wheezy. I could not work out how to
do anything at all. Literally, the only button to click on was the one to
exit. So I did.

~~~
adrianlmm
And I remember the first time I used GNOME 3, it was a great experience, I
pressed the Windows key and a few letters and I could launch the program I
wanted, I could press the winkey again and have an overview of my openned
Windows, I could press ctrl+shif+arrow up or down and I could switch from one
virtual desktop to another, I could press alt + the key above tab and I could
switch betwen the Windows of the same applications, there was barely the need
to use the mouse or navigate in menus to click something, It was an awesome,
intuitive and productive experience, cause the desktop was getting out of my
way, that was my first experience with GNOME 3.

------
davidgerard
It's worth bringing up Jamie Zawinski's post on the subject of GNOME (and this
was the 1.x-2.x transition!), "The CADT Model":
[http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)

 _" It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-
scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest
and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8,
which is then followed by version 0.8?"_

------
mtgx
XFCE is pretty nice. Still not as fast and using as low resources as LXDE, but
it's still much better than Gnome 3-based DE's.

------
a-l-c-o
I tried debian 7.2 default gnome. It feels like bloody Windows Vista. Switched
back to the beloved Xfce.

Debian, you are wasting time with that.. thing.

~~~
davidgerard
I tried Debian Gnome 3 in wheezy.

I decided "right, this is the new user-friendly desktop. Let's see how I go."

I literally couldn't find anything to click on to make it work. Literally
nothing. The only button I could find was how to switch it off.

'I recommend this Dusk Till Dawn quote to desktop designers: "Are you such a
loser, you can't tell when you've won?".'

~~~
uhohuhhuh
I can't remember for sure, but I think I was lost at first too. Then I
discovered the windows key, and never looked back. I love getting most things
done without touching the mouse. Though I did have to install a panel for when
I work with more than a few instances of the same program at once (at which
point alt tab can sometimes not allow me to differentiate between the
instances as fast as I'd like).

I still think they should pop up a short tutorial when you first use it.

~~~
davidgerard
Yeah. I thought "ok, this is supposed to be user-obvious. Let's see what I can
do."

I wonder how that Windows key thing works out for their hypothetical tablet
users.

~~~
adrianlmm
With the home key instead of the window key, it is a no brainer.

~~~
davidgerard
Can you unlock the screen without a physical keyboard yet?

~~~
adrianlmm
Yes, there is a virtual keyboard in the unlock screen.

~~~
davidgerard
Does it have tilde yet?
[http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3017371&cid=4083522...](http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3017371&cid=40835229)

~~~
adrianlmm
I don't know that yet, I'll tell you when I get to my Linux box =).

------
txutxu
On most build systems, it's enough to change a default in one place, and not
the same default in two different places.

~~~
VLM
4 locations, if you count the commit. 1 place actually changes it, the rest
are documentation.

/debian/changelog is a highly formalized free form-ish text file explaining
what changed since the last .deb package. You could put lorem ipsum in there
and the package wouldn't care although it would annoy people.

/debian/control is a list of recommends (why not a "depend"?) I believe this
is a cosmetic change only ( 1 or 0 or 0 or 0 logically equals the result of 0
or 1 or 0 or 0, that type of thing )

(whoops edited to note that its some tasksel thing so its more than cosmetic,
but for joe average doin all the defaults what matters will be the template
file...)

/debian/templates is the sort of free form yet structured debconf question
file that actually does the task selection.

~~~
claudius
Note that default dependency takes the first hit, i.e. A or B selects A by
default, whereas B or A selects B, so the ordering in the control file does
matter.

------
adestefan
Debian's jessie GNOME packages were also woefully out of date until the past 2
weeks. You can finally run GNOME 3.8 which was released over 7 months ago. At
this rate they'll always been at least 1 stable version behind and probably
end up at 2 behind by the time jessie is frozen next year.

~~~
abenga
It's worse than that. Gnome-shell (probably the most visible part of Gnome) is
still at 3.4 in Jessie. It just hit Sid last week or something.

That said, I've used Gnome 3 since it was still in development and grew to
love it. After using 3.8 (on Ubuntu Gnome 13.10), I think 3.8's improvements
over 3.6 are pretty significant. It feels lighter, faster, smoother overall.
The newly redesigned apps (e.g. evince) feel extremely well designed too.

~~~
tvst
Same here. I'm a big fan of Gnome Shell nowadays. Simple, fast, beautiful. No
more hours of tweaking my default install of $FAVORITE_DISTRO until it's
usable. Love it.

------
lucasnemeth
Incredible closing sentence.

------
rick_d
At first I thought this said "Change default desktop to xkcd"

------
technoir
Too bad they didnt switch to windowlab. Now that is a lightweight window
manager. Amiga style window management!

------
andyl
Unity and Gnome3 drove me to xubuntu. Really happy I made the switch.

~~~
forktheif
Unity and Gnome3 drove me to lubuntu. Really happy I made the switch.

And I've heard the same or similar from many other people.

------
qwerta
Who cares?

~~~
alextingle
Why click on the thread if you don't care?

------
elipsey
must... resist... urge to troll... (edited for stupidity)

Ok, I kid, I kid... :)

But seriously, I'm thinking of switching back to testing from Ubuntu, if stuff
doesn't break too often.

Is anyone here using testing lately, and did it seem fairly solid for daily
desktop use?

