Debian desktop environment choices stink in Wheezy
DebianThis forum is for the discussion of Debian Linux.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
After I posted this, I ended up choosing XFCE which I have been using for the past several months. My desktop looks like I am running Windows 2000, but it works well enough for me. I like having a weather applet, and having a few programs like Banshee minimize to the system tray and run in the background without keeping a window open. I like having a file manager that allows opening multiple windows and dragging/dropping between them. The menus are easily editable. I do have a few quirks due to the already mentioned gtk3/gtk3 insanity. Otherwise, it works and I have not thought of switching to something else.
You can make XFCE look however you'd like. Yes, perhaps at the default, it looks Win-ish but you can change that easily. The GTK3/GTK2 "insanity", yeah I hate to say find a theme that has both in the same package, because that is not going away any time soon.
On that note a compatibility layer would have been nice with the note "This is to be nice, but it's not our priority in maintaining it" this way you wouldn't need both GTK3 and GTK2 libs installed. But, meh, not going to happen.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Randicus Draco Albus
The movement is called voting with one's feet. Gnome, KDE and Canonical put what they consider beauty ahead of functionality. At the moment, enough people use those GUIs to sustain the trend. So those who do not like them must go elsewhere.
Yeah because they're looking at what the other ("commercial?") OSes are doing and so those DE devs are trying to emulate them to capture part of the market. I think it would be really great if these devs could figure out how to balance the gee-whiz eye candy stuff of the commercial OSes and keep the functionality of a desktop people are expecting. Or, even listen to their users (ahem devs on a DE that start with with "GN").
The movement is called voting with one's feet. Gnome, KDE and Canonical put what they consider beauty ahead of functionality. At the moment, enough people use those GUIs to sustain the trend. So those who do not like them must go elsewhere.
Gnome 3 I dont use, and unity....well, nobody needs to see me swear online LOL.
But I dont have any issues with functionality with KDE4. What functionality problems/issues do you have with KDE4?
No, I'm not suggesting that KDE4 is perfect, or even close to it. Honestly, I'm probably just going to go back to Xfce on my main desktop in the next few weeks...
Distribution: Debian /Jessie/Stretch/Sid, Linux Mint DE
Posts: 5,195
Rep:
@m_yates: This is a duplication of what has been said before, but Debian is not to blame.
And if you think none of the available DE/WM is matching your preferences, try Windows 8 for a few minutes. Just to make you realize how happy you are using Linux. What a mess, what a mess.
Distribution: Debian Testing, Stable, Sid and Manjaro, Mageia 3, LMDE
Posts: 2,628
Rep:
The Xfce folks decided to postpone moving to gtk3 in favor of getting their version 4.10 working correctly. Will be going to gtk3 with 4.12.
4.10 was supposed to be the version used in Wheezy but was having trouble with the panel during freeze and Wheezy went with 4.8 which I thought was a smart move for Stable.
Watch the backports for that version. I am pretty sure it should show up.
Thunar 1.6.3 is what I am using here in Sid and also in Jessie installs. It also has the ability to use tabs. I like being able to use separate windows but tabs are handy too.
The panel has always been able to be placed anywhere you want it (them) but now they have a "deskbar" option so that icons in a verticle panel are horizontal if verticle panels blow your skirt up.
I actually use an antique looking setup because I am a grumpy geezer. You can actually customize Xfce quite a bit to get a more modern look.
I think it is actually the DE (ignoring the "boxes") with the most potential for the flexibility to fit a lot of different form factors.
We have a large screen TV that I am tempted to hook up to someday with Xfce and use a top and center screen horizontal panel with a verticle in the center to quarter the screen for 4 window positions on that large sreen.
Don't have a touch screen but I think the Xfce panel is about as good as it gets for being usable on a touch screen. The Unity and Gnome Shell "launchers" are not configurable enough as far as where you may actually want them.
Of coarse if you want total flexibility and configurablity the boxes are great. I really like OpenBox and it is currently my fall back if Xfce decides to get as flaky as KDE, Gnome and Unity. You can make it do anything.
But I dont have any issues with functionality with KDE4. What functionality problems/issues do you have with KDE4?
It is bloated with so much useless stuff that even with 4GB of RAM, it is still sluggish. Several KDE applications are great, but the whole package is too cumbersome for my liking.
It is bloated with so much useless stuff that even with 4GB of RAM, it is still sluggish. Several KDE applications are great, but the whole package is too cumbersome for my liking.
I use KDE for the guest account on my machines. Works fine on a dualcore with 4GB RAM. KDE is pretty modular, if there is functionality that you don't need just disable it.
This isn't a linux question, just a mini-rant. Earlier today I wiped squeeze and did a fresh install of wheezy on my main desktop. I have to say that the desktop environment choices in Wheezy are awful. The worst in my 10 years of using Debian. Gnome 3 and KDE 4 both seem like they tried to fix what wasn't broken. XFCE is OK, but looks long in the tooth. LXDE seems to be the best of the lot, but it doesn't have nearly the features as good old Gnome 2 or KDE 3.5 did.
I gave up and installed MATE for Wheezy to give me an environment that works. On my laptop, I wiped squeeze and installed Linux Mint instead of Wheezy. Mint seems to be the only distribution bucking the trend of awful desktop environments.
When KDE 4 first came out, it was lacking a lot of features that 3.5 had. It seemed to focus more on prettiness at first. After a while KDE 4 has just as many if not more features than 3.5. But if you really miss 3.5 that much, check out the Trinity Desktop Environment. Debian is not to blame for this.
It is bloated with so much useless stuff that even with 4GB of RAM, it is still sluggish. Several KDE applications are great, but the whole package is too cumbersome for my liking.
So its not a functionality issue, just a dislike of DEs you find 'bloated'.
I got a whole gig of memory and a dual core 2ghz processor and I can load the basic kde environment and only be using about 130mb of memory according to the ps_mem.py tool. That doesn't seem very bloaty to me. Obviously that is tweaked a good bit...
It is rarely the desktop items itself but rather the associated started/running apps that are bloaty along with effects/candy adding to it as well.
I have LXDE as the main desktop on Wheezy, it works perfectly and I now use lightdm as the window manager/login screen.
I pretty much gave up on XFCE because the 32-bit version kept crashing X when logging out, restarting X and brought me back to the login screen each time when I wanted to either reboot or shutdown. This is a long-term problem (bug) going back several years, occurred with more than one Linux distro and it was apparently never fixed. Although on 64-bit, XFCE correctly shuts down.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.