[Pkg-xfce-devel] Reverting to GNOME for jessie's default desktop

[Paul C. Bryan]

I think an important consideration--not yet under discussion--is how the
general public may interpret the choice of desktop environment. I view
the desktop as the face of Debian for the majority of desktop users;
maybe naive of users, but a consideration nevertheless.

With all due respect to XFCE, I'd hate the interpretation to be along
the lines of, "Oh, Debian state of the art desktop environment feels
something like Windows, circa 2000." But, XFCE's lightweight. It's meant
to lack such fancy features.

I respectfully submit that picking a modern compositing desktop
environment establishes Debian as modern distribution, operating at the
same level as Macs and PCs you would buy new today.

Paul

On Fri, 2014-08-08 at 17:23 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Samuel Thibault (2014-08-08 16:19:28)
> > Jonas Smedegaard, le Fri 08 Aug 2014 16:11:58 +0200, a écrit :
> >> The following is on a wheezy chroot:
> >> 
> >> root at bastian:/# aptitude install task-gnome-desktop
> >> The following NEW packages will be installed:
> >> [...]
> >> Need to get 370 MB of archives. After unpacking 1099 MB will be used.
> >> 
> >> root at bastian:/# aptitude install task-xfce-desktop
> >> The following NEW packages will be installed:
> >> [...]
> >> Need to get 115 MB of archives. After unpacking 348 MB will be used.
> >> 
> >> Desktop needing 370MB versus 115MB seems pretty significant to me.
> >
> > Actually it's 1.1GiB versus 348MiB. But that is barring the rest of 
> > the desktop.
> 
> If the concern was e.g. price of harddisk to install on, then the 
> finally used disk space be the measure.
> 
> ...but the concern I raised is bandwidth for packages to be installed - 
> which over-simplified can be expressed as "does it fit on a CD?".
> 
> Numbers for Sid (in a chroot for task package, not for a full install), 
> is 389MB versus 101MB.
> 
> 
> > More precise measurements can be found in the installation manual, for 
> > which we also install task-desktop etc. which ends up with 3.2GiB for 
> > Gnome & KDE, 2.3GiB for XFCE, 2GiB for LXDE.
> 
> I believe (but haven't checked) that installation manual don't document 
> bandwidth needs - in the past users could simply assume "a single 
> desktop fits on first CD".
> 
> 
>  - Jonas
>