Debian desktop environment choices stink in Wheezy
 

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.

Hi,

so you're complaining because you don't like the current versions of KDE and Gnome, and because a fork of the old generation of Gnome is not packaged in Debian? Please, I enjoy reading a decent rant, but was thoroughly disappointed by this one. I think I'll have to remove linunxquestions.org from my browser and go somewhere where there is a better selection of rant to choose from.

Evo2.

May they rest in peace. I don't miss them at all.

I actually have Wheezy GNOME, Wheezy Xfce, and Wheezy KDE, all installed on different computers. They all seem great to me.

That is very interesting, considering any GUI can be installed on a Debian system.

1) How is Debian to blame for the quality of GUIs others develop (and are the same GUIs used on every other system)?
2) If you do not like any of the DEs, why not try a WM? Especially since WMs are better than DEs.

This is the kind of rant I would expect from an Ubuntu user, not a Debian user.

Edit
I did not notice Ubuntu in the user profile before posting. Carry on.

Now, now.. You remember being a rookie ranter. They'll get better with time. What we really need is a practice section. :)

My first rant I forgot to breathe and ended up passing out before I got to my climax...

Yes no DE is perfect... but XFCE is not as bad as you're making it out to be. The good thing about XFCE is that it's very customisable and you can freely move panels around, create extra ones and have full control over what's on them, you can have desktop icons or not and just theme it how you want... In my humble opinion XFCE offers everything a desktop user could want, but I expect many would disagree with that.

gnome-shell on the other hand forces the "vision" down your throat and the user is kept on a short leash ensuring that they use it how the developers envisage and that it has a distinct identity. That's not my anti gnome-shell rant, that's just what the gnome devs have said in so many words. At the end of the day they can do as they please and you have the choice to use it or not.

As I see it you found a solution in installing mate from a 3rd party, so I don't see the problem.

I have never been fully content with any DE and pretty much abandoned them about a year ago and stuck to window managers - my preference is for fluxbox.

That makes 2 strong statements in favor of WMs. Maybe we could change this from a rather sorry rant to a first rate flame war about the best WhateverBox.

I really like OpenBox.

openbox is nice, I used to use it with the tint2 panel, but once I discovered fluxbox I haven't looked back. Every bit of userpace configuration in fluxbox is easier and it comes with a panel.

I made my suggestion to try WMs, because the OP does not like any of the four DEs. 1) WMs are different, so the OP may find them more attractive. 2) They can be customised well beyond the level of a DE. I mention Openbox because it is the one I am most familiar with, can be customised any way one wants to customise it. The OP would then be able to create the perfect GUI, instead of being disappointed while waiting for someone else to do it. (Take matters into his/her own hands.)

You beat me to it. Yeah, the default configuration that comes with Xfce is pretty bland and uninspired, but it is highly configurable and can be made beautiful, without the RAM-hogging that comes with Gnome and KDE. In my experience (but maybe I haven't tried hard enough), it's more configurable than MATE.

But whatever. Yeah, weak rant. Debian gives you a solid, plain base to build on. Every damn DE or WM you could ever want is in the repos, or close at hand.

so where should he take his rant?
 

I've just done a dist-upgrade to wheezy and once again another desktop environment has been trashed. I also have a box running Ubuntu (unity) and had
to access a backup which was pre-unity and was amazed at how good (and fast) desktops used to be. I've recently taken to using the squeeze based machine more ... I'm coming to the conclusion I'd be better of with raw "X" + xterm and the right click (root context) menu. Every time a desktop changes folks spend months of effort to recover 80% of what they had before , after 80% of 80% of ... it's getting ridiculous . Is there
no movement to stop this decent into totally the unusable ?

FYI. I found this thread while searching for how to recover my right-click menu in wheezy. Perhaps a redirect some kind of campaign for real desktops might be best?

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.
A campaign is not needed. XFCE, LXDE and the "Boxes" have all reaped new harvests of users, because of the development direction of the big guys. That trend will continue.

Maybe you should elaborate on what is missing in lxde? I don't find much missing but I don't need much to make me happy. That being said I usually do not use lxde.

I don't understand why you complain that xfce is 'long in the tooth' but then complain about both gnome and kde leaving behind the traditional look and trying to fix what wasn't broken. It seems 'long in the tooth' was what they were trying to fix.

I have never found mate to do anything that xfce or lxde did not do for me but my needs are fairly simple. The thing I hate about using mate (or any gtk2 desktop) on a newer distro is that I invariably end up installing some apps that use gtk3 so then I have two toolkits to deal with. Of course I could use mate with a older distro but if I am going to do that I may as well use old gnome from the repos. That is what I am currently using until I decide on something newer.

Of course regardless of what you use for the desktop you have to install a browser which means dragging in some big ass toolkit and its tag-alongs. It is sad to think that I will decide on a browser and that will dictate the toolkit I will accept for my user environment. Even sadder is that it seems if you want flash to work well then the current solution is Google Chrome which is still using gtk2 I believe. So it seems almost certain that to use a newer distro means dealing with gtk2 and gtk3...so maybe sticking with Debian Squeeze is the answer...except I haven't been able to get a new version of chrome working on it...

So my rant in a nutshell is all new distros suck because they all have the gtk2/gtk3 insanity...

now...who is next up for the rant box

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.

As for what is wrong with LXDE, modifying the menus is not intuitive, and I never used it long enough to figure out how to install and use tray applets or minimize anything to the system tray.

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.

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").

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...

Have a look here: http://xfce-look.org/

@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.

jlinkels

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.

m_yates

its time to introduce you to the dark side of the force youngling

debian sid
with modest protection of partition images supplied by fsarchiver if I make a mistake

with modest protection of update (and config) script smxi from smxi.org

with a beautiful WM of Enlightenment (in sid called e17)

I would show you my desktop but its a little pornographic and you are a youngling

not forgetting the liquorix kernel from liquorix.net

no rant intended

grins like a sheep

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.

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.

So its not a functionality issue, just a dislike of DEs you find 'bloated'. ;)

Yes I dislike "full-featured" DEs, but that is irrelevant. If a GUI is slow because it is bloated, that is a functionality issue.

Weird, my laptop that has 4 GB ram runs a full KDE desktop and isn't in the least bit sluggish.

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.

So,,, you took a "bad rant" and made it worse? :|

KDE (very changeable ;)) and Xfce are still my favorites just change them. Now I log in CLI only for anything nonlinear like here now (but if I need more than cheesy graphics :D) I almost always have at lest 3 WMs for most installs. http://xwinman.org/basics.php
http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/30/h...manager-linux/

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.

Is there a bug report about this? Please post your source as I would like to know more.

Please define 'slow' and 'bloated' to allow for more discussion please.

Here you can get a good idea about slow!

And here a very good idea about bloated!

And here the most known combination of both!!

Regards!!

I couldn't find those things in my kde install, maybe you could point them out for me?


Usually those people that talk about slow and bloated install openbox and then install and run a network manager, conky, wallpaper changer, clipboard, volume control applet, notification tool, automount utility, panel, power manager, etc...


In other words, they love to THINK they have somehow eliminated all the bloat when they have actually added more bloat than can be found in a tweaked install of a full desktop environment.

You really think that is good? Try that on this comp!!

yea I have POS systems that would croak on it as well...not really relevant though....

I can't smell the stink. I clean my computers though.

Maybe a can of air and some Lysol?

Run what ya brung. I guess the worst thing someone can do to some people is offer free software to them.

I love all of them... some for old like JWM and for newer I like how bloatware rhymes with cycles to spare! :hattip:

I went from KDE4 to Fluxbox+Compton. I'm happy. I use XFCE4 on my laptop and it runs fine.

I like all user environments, but I don't love any of them. I just keep switching environments to see which one bugs me the least. It seems xfce may win. Maybe. At least you can use single click on the desktop with 4.10. Now if the damn icons on the panel would be closer to the panel size. Not to mention those small ass icons for the windows buttons.

Don't forget many are infinitely changeable. Plus, think about them opposed to microcoughed$ winblow$ or the ever out-dating ma¢$!

I have switched to Xfce 4.10. I use a some custom icons because they are kind of fun to make.

The Icons can also be modified. If they are made to be 48x48 pixels they will fit to your panel (mine is 34 pixels because I can see things at that size).

I use .png files for the custom stuff. You will find many are .svg and Gimp doesn't deal with them but will convert them to .png.

Most of the provided Icons are actually of a size to fit your panel but the size is in the transparent section as you can see if you cursor over them on the panel. Crop the transparent and resize to the original size will make them a more appropriate size.

This works with any DE icons. I have no doubt that the Icon size is choosen for some good reason but I like them bigger.

I like the default size of the Desktop buttons but that is easy to change with Settings Manager>Desktop>Icons where you will find a setting for Icon Size set at 25 which you can change. There is an option for custom icon size but I have no idea how this is different from just changing the Icon Size setting.

I have done that in KDE too, lets you drag an icon to any size kinda fun having huge clickables. :D

Do you enjoy displaying your ignorance?

What ignorance? I should not of used the word "usually" as it most likely makes it a false statement. I wished I had used the word "some" instead.

If you google openbox and look at the images provided it is hard to find one without a bunch of 'extras' running. I do not see what 'bloat' is eliminated in those cases. It may still be less bloat, often with less functionality. Of course if you do not need/want that functionality then that is all well and good. But not much point in claiming something is bloated simply because you have removed features yet still use the same amount of memory/cpu resources to accomplish a task.

There are a few things about openbox that I do not care for but there is certainly nothing wrong with it. But I would think users would choose it to slim down rather than to bloat up their user environment. So if they want something slim then it would seem contradictory to turn around and install all the stuff that is missing from a non-slim desktop. Would it not?

I have seen numerous openbox setups that use more resources than my gnome/kde/etc desktop setups. It really blows my mind and makes no sense to me. And yes, some of those users are the ones I have seen talking about how bloated gnome/kde/etc are....

I also think some of the users of a 'heavy' openbox setup would find a xfce setup to provide the same or similar look along with more functionality and better integration...same resource usage too.

But that may just be me...

Oh and not to mention that regardless if your desktop uses 32mb at startup or 320mb at startup, once you open a full featured web browser and hit the web for a couple hours you will likely be using a gig of memory. So does a couple or even a couple hundred for a user environment even matter that much.

I enjoy these arguments on bloat. Very entertaining.

Bloat is in the eye of the beholder and always will be.

To me, KDE is terribly bloated. So is Gnome. Why? Because about half of the "features" are of absolutley no use to me what so ever. That is bloat.

On the other hand my Xfce install is actually bigger and uses more resources than my installs of KDE or Gnome. Is it bloated. Undoubtedly it is in the view of many if not most users. It is not to me. It has a lot of stuff installed on it. I use them all. Therefore my install is not bloated although it would be if on just about anyone elses box.

As for Openbox, I have an install of that too. It has all the extra applications that I use here. It is smaller and uses less resources than my Xfce install. I don't use it much because I prefer Xfce.

If Xfce decides to go with what I concider to be "entertainment" add ons like Gnome, which I dropped as my production DE for Xfce, or KDE which appears to be mainly aimed at people that want to spend a large amount of time configuring its desktop appearance (my opinion) then Openbox will be my next DE although it is not a DE at all but a window manager.

I use 6 workstations. They are generally all populated with something I am doing. I don't see my desktop. Any kind of eye candy is pretty much wasted on me. I like a menu. I don't like extra added layers for getting my applications up. I find the launchers for Xfce very handy for my most used applications so I use them.

Conky does not blow my skirt up at all. It does do that for a lot of people. It is also capable of doing most of the things that the KDE desktop will do in a much less obtrusive way. So while I consider it bloat as used by most people it is not to them.

I can see why people like KDE. I started testing Gnome Shell in 2010. It is interesting and I can see what people like about it, I don't like it a bit.

I have a loaner drive, an external enclosure with a number of installs on it. This is for interested people to borrow to see what Linux looks like on their box and running at speed. Gnome and KDE are on there and fully configured, with advice from folks that acutally like them, to give people a choice. Also have Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce and OpenBox on there.

Linux is about choice. We can even have tiny, fast, non resource using installs. Or huge installs. We have a choice of a number of different gui environments. We can customize any part of it we want.

My installs have replaced Windows. My wifes install replaced Windows. I use Xfce and she prefers Mate. This is great. We can do more with our installs than we ever could on Windows. Haven't ever used a Mac. I suspect that we would still be able to do more with our Linux installs.

I don't know what all she has on hers. Haven't checked lately. Some of it would simply be bloat on mine. She has, for instance, GnuCash on hers. Have no idea what I would do with that. Pretty sure she has little or no use for the Gimp that is installed on mine.

If you enjoy the DE you are using it is great. If you don't find one that is close and change it so it suits you. There are an awful lot of them available. New ones pop up all the time. Run a search. Appears that there are a lot of people not content with the DEs currently available. They build one that suits them. Try some.

Very few distros have actually created DEs. I suppose Ubuntu with Unity is one of the very few that have and it started life as a concept for an extention for Gnome Shell.

There are a number of distros that have been released, however, that are built strictly, based on some old distro like Debian, to show off some new DE. This is an easy way to look at them if you do not want to install them on your current OS. Have some FUN with Linux.

I am certainly not some sort of geek guru. Even I can customize a DE. Config files are all there. Mess with them. Break your DE a few times and learn something. I am in my 60s, never touched a computer until well into my 40s (MSDos), and even I can learn this stuff.

Or sit around and pout that no one has made something for you.

But carry on. I am enjoying this thread a lot. May even glean something out of it besides entertainment.

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7442

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2169251

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=684188

uh....thanks for those concrete references.....

Well, two of them are bug reports...

I also Googled 'XFCE crashes x' and many instances came up. This occurred going back several years with Mandriva, Ubuntu and now Debian, crashes in 32-bit only. It's all I can say.

Fluxbox is indeed nice, but, I do like some bells and whistles. XFCE works well for me on Debian Jessie.
This is an entertaining thread. :)