The Gnome desktop that ships with Debian is not buggy. It just has high video requirements with all its effects and fancy UI.

If you are looking for a good desktop environment in Debian, use Xfce. Xfce has low system requirements and can be configured to be just as slick as any of these other popular fancy desktop environments.

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there is always "Enlightenment"
that is fun to use

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Thank you all, it looks like the problem is, as most said, Gnome3. It is good to know it is easy to select another GUI, I was a bit concerned to find other problems with the other GUIs as I am completely ignorant of progress made in those areas and I simply did not know Gnome2 is now MATE.

I reinstalled Debian 7 to be able to use my machine and I will reinstall Debian 8 in the next few weeks - with another GUI or two (MATE and Xfce) and give that a try, I may have too much to learn if I want to switch to KDE.

If you installed 7 just edit sources.list & upgrade to 8.

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Agreed.

One has their choice of desktops, if they do not desire GNOME 3. Personally I like GNOME 3, but I see how others don't. Technical demerits aside, I've just gotten used to it, and when I use XFCE at work, I find myself doing things the GNOME way.

SystemD... well... I really think most people are not going to notice any difference. Newbies especially, as they never dealt with SysVInit and likely aren't going to get into init for some time, and by the time they do it will be irrelevant. It has some glitches (fails to power off at shutdown on most of my machines) and it's stupid logging facilities... a few other things... but for the most part I don't have any difficulties using my PC as a result.

You have been using Debian for twenty years, but did not know you have a choice of dozens of GUIs? That is surprising, especially since twenty years ago Linux systems required more hands-on interaction from the user than they do today.

Current version of Mint Debian, LMDE2, is rather nice with DE Mate. It's my main squeeze, with no systemd stuff for this release (thanks Clem for this reprieve). Running SolydX on my 4 year old netbook, as I wanted a relatively slim Debian with XFCE DE. Mint folks aren't doing XFCE with Debian. Systemd is all over the SolydX distro, but for my purposes on an old netbook, don't really care. Just my two bits via my LMDE2 box.

P.S. - if I wasn't retired and was still worried about servers, et al, I'd probably have totally different views on the direction of Debian.

I am a little confused by this. Since LMDE is Debian plus some extras it should be trivially easy to just install XFCE from the repositories and go -- I know that's what I used to do when I ran Mint on my netbook. Or have they changed LMDE so that not all Debian packages can be installed now?

I've never been a Mint user, but according to Clement Lefebvre with LMDE 2 the project switched to Debian stable, so I guess that it shouldn't be a problem to still use Debian's repos.

This was posted on 28 August 2014:
http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2014/0...e-named-betsy/

Here is a relevant thread on this from the LinuxMint forums:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopi...f=221&p=998904

It can be done, but the user needs to customize bells and whistles that were formerly available with a downloaded distro iso. If you scroll down through the thread, you'll see the pros and cons of manually installing from the Debian repositories to LMDE 2 vs. doing a clean install of a pre-configured XFCE distro like SolydX. I chose the latter route. If support for SolydXK development starts flagging - and it might - I might start playing around with XFCE on top of LMDE2 Mate.

Ah, yes, if you want XFCE 4.12 on Debian Stable, or something based upon it, that could be tricky. If you're OK sticking with XFCE 4.10 as Debian Stable does it's as easy on LMDE as any other distro.