Steve McIntyre wrote: > This goes back to during the wheezy release cycle. There was a little > discussion around a change in tasksel [1], but rather too late in the > day for the change to make sense. Now we have rather more time, I > feel. Let's change the default desktop for installation to xfce.
So, I wish that wheezy had shipped with xfce as the default. It was the better choice of the options we had (although possbly kde would have been a good choice too). Personally, having been through the gnome 2.0 transition, and seeing that the gnome devs can throw out old stuff, arguably regress functionality for a while, but end up with new better stuff, I had to discount the initial discontent about gnome shell. (Also, most of the threads about it rapidly reached a point of diminishing returns to keep reading.) Also, I was not in a position to try gnome 3.4 myself at all, hardware, and bandwidth wise, until rather too late in the release cycle. I didn't see conclusive proof that gnome 3.4 was really the wrong default for wheezy until I started putting it on end-user machines and seeing them struggle with it, and then be perfectly happy when switched to xfce. (A few such real world tests are much more useful than a metric mutt-load of threads.) Anyway, at the moment I don't know which is the right choice for jessie. There is a full year for gnome to be improved, and it could easily be a better experience for users at that point. I would not be opposed to changing the default for xfce for now, and reverting it if gnome's improvements make it a better choice. I do wish that some of the .. energy .. seen in these threads could be used for something more interesting. For example, find a way to detect touch screen systems, on which xfce is *not* pleasant, and don't install a desktop task there, but a separate task with whichever UI is currently best suited for tablets. > * Tweak CD and installer builds: > + change what happens with no desktop selected to use xfce instead > of Gnome (netinst, DVD, BD etc.) The tasksel change handles that. > + Add an explicitly-named Gnome CD#1 > + Remove the explicitly-named XFCE CD#1 You might consider making the default CD be a symlink to the explicitly named desktop CD. -- see shy jo
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature