Favorite DE/WM in Wheezy

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paulcs · #1 Post by **paulcs** » 2013-05-19 23:22

So out of curiosity what is everyone's favorite DE/WM in Wheezy? I've upgraded my Squeeze system to Wheezy, and I mostly like XFCE since it is a lot like Gnome 2 IMO. I am also playing with Gnome-Shell just to see the big difference. I can see why people are mad about the changes so far. Most likely I will stick with XFCE for this laptop since I got 1 processor 2.6 ghz and only 2 gb ram. I also may try KDE. If this laptop meets its requirements.

I have added more WMs to the poll. Mate is not in the official repos hence not included. Not to mention the poll limitations.

confuseling · #2 Post by **confuseling** » 2013-05-19 23:52

I don't get why polls like this never have an entry for tiling WMs.

I mean you've got one for Icewm...?

Icewm: 2192

Awesome: 3066
xmonad: 1888
dwm: 1042
i3: 849

http://popcon.debian.org/

dasein · #3 Post by **dasein** » 2013-05-20 00:40

I suspect that the results of this poll won't be dramatically different from the results of previous polls like this, except as regards GNOME 3 and its various alternatives.

That is to say, I liked KDE on Squeeze, and I still like it on Wheezy. Someone who liked Fluxbox on Squeeze probably still likes it on Wheezy. And. So. On.

MALsPa · #4 Post by **MALsPa** » 2013-05-20 01:11

dasein wrote:I suspect that the results of this poll won't be dramatically different from the results of previous polls like this, except as regards GNOME 3 and its various alternatives.

That is to say, I liked KDE on Squeeze, and I still like it on Wheezy. Someone who liked Fluxbox on Squeeze probably still likes it on Wheezy. And. So. On.

Yep. I have Wheezy Xfce and Wheezy GNOME installed here, and I like them both. I have a feeling that I'd also be happy with KDE, or just about anything else. The only real "favorite" DE/WM I have is probably the one I happen to be using at any given moment.

ComputerBob · #5 Post by **ComputerBob** » 2013-05-20 03:23

I can't possibly be the only one here who is annoyed that this same question keeps getting asked and answered, over and over, every few weeks.

bwat47 · #6 Post by **bwat47** » 2013-05-20 18:33

I really like wheezy's gnome 3.4 (gnome-shell) desktop, it works perfectly for me and is very stable.

After a little tweaking its very pleasant:

MALsPa · #7 Post by **MALsPa** » 2013-05-20 19:31

ComputerBob wrote:I can't possibly be the only one here who is annoyed that this same question keeps getting asked and answered, over and over, every few weeks.

The closest I've found is this thread, which was last posted in back in February: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=64367

But that wasn't the same question.

confuseling · #8 Post by **confuseling** » 2013-05-20 19:49

Not as often as people think, perhaps, because the threads tend to last forever: "Chocolate ice cream is nicer than strawberry. Discuss."

Just seems to be 'one of those questions'...

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=80733
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=63626

paulcs · #9 Post by **paulcs** » 2013-05-20 23:51

Sorry for asking the question. I do realize it was asked countless times. But I was curious on people's opinions for Wheezy due to the Gnome 3 switch over to see what most was still using, I won't ask again.

ComputerBob · #10 Post by **ComputerBob** » 2013-05-21 00:27

paulcs wrote:Sorry for asking the question. I do realize it was asked countless times. But I was curious on people's opinions for Wheezy due to the Gnome 3 switch over to see what most was still using, I won't ask again.

Please do a search before you post. If you had searched before you started this thread, you would have seen that many people here have already been using Wheezy for the past couple of years, so the switch to Gnome3 has already been discussed several times -- and if you wanted to know more about Gnome3 than what has previously been posted, a direct question about Gnome3 would have gotten you better information than this thread's generic poll about several DEs/WMs.

dasein · #11 Post by **dasein** » 2013-05-21 00:39

paulcs wrote:I was curious on people's opinions for Wheezy due to the Gnome 3 switch over to see what most was still using...

Don't feel bad. No one is more irritated by superfluously redundant content than I am. But your point is quite correct: Debian Stable users are just now getting their first taste of GNOME 3, and Wheezy's KDE 4.8 is substantially different from Squeeze's KDE 4.4. There are even a few subtle but potentially interesting differences between Xfce 4.8.3 and 4.6.2.

So re-asking the question at this juncture--or with any Stable release--seems like a perfectly appropriate thing to do.

(And at the risk of pointing out the painfully obvious, to this point in the thread, there is indeed exactly and only one individual who finds it even remotely objectionable.)

bholten · #12 Post by **bholten** » 2013-05-21 02:32

I've stuck with stable + backports for a long time, so this is the first time I've had a chance to really formulate an opinion on Gnome 3, which was a huge change.

I have to say, after getting used to it, I quite like it, but I can see why it caused such an uproar. I already find myself missing many of Gnome 3's features when I use other desktops.

TonyVanDam · #13 Post by **TonyVanDam** » 2013-05-21 17:30

paulcs wrote:So out of curiosity what is everyone's favorite DE/WM in Wheezy? I've upgraded my Squeeze system to Wheezy, and I mostly like XFCE since it is a lot like Gnome 2 IMO. I am also playing with Gnome-Shell just to see the big difference. I can see why people are mad about the changes so far. Most likely I will stick with XFCE for this laptop since I got 1 processor 2.6 ghz and only 2 gb ram. I also may try KDE. If this laptop meets its requirements.

I have added more WMs to the poll. Mate is not in the official repos hence not included. Not to mention the poll limitations.

1. For the time being, my favorite DE for Debian Stable is LXDE.

2. No disrespect Paulcs, but your poll setup is kind of flawed. You don't have Enlightenment or JWM as options for people to vote on.

vbrummond · #14 Post by **vbrummond** » 2013-05-21 17:58

I voted KDE. A lot of Qt/KDE software is messier and buggier (in my opinion) but it seems like it is so much easier for them to be cross platform. Also that I can run a KDE desktop with compositing off, or even on but with no animations for best performance.

robert3242 · #15 Post by **robert3242** » 2013-05-22 02:47

I went with KDE. I've never been a particular fan of it before, and as others have posted here I tried Gnome 3.4 and found it far more usable and even pleasant than I expected. But KDE is the closest thing Debian offers to the traditional PC desktop metaphor, so I decided to take it for a spin. I installed the standard Debian KDE desktop environment and found things included which I didn't like, but when I started with kde-baseapps and built my DE from there, I ended up with a DE which I truly do enjoy using. To each his/her own.

anastasis · #16 Post by **anastasis** » 2013-05-22 11:09

Cinnamon. I'm sold on it. I don't care if it's a Mint fork. It's just flat better. So I've betrayed the cause. I don't care. Cinnamon actually makes gtk3 functional. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

MALsPa · #17 Post by **MALsPa** » 2013-05-22 11:50

dasein wrote:re-asking the question at this juncture--or with any Stable release--seems like a perfectly appropriate thing to do

I think so, too. Glad to see the poll and the comments in this thread.

bholten wrote:I have to say, after getting used to it, I quite like it, but I can see why it caused such an uproar. I already find myself missing many of Gnome 3's features when I use other desktops.

I miss things about GNOME Shell when I'm using something else, too -- especially dynamic workspaces. There are things about KDE that I miss when I'm not using that, too, though. I did a Wheezy KDE installation the other day, and it looks pretty good.

I think that Nautilus is actually what I like least about GNOME 3, but it's easy enough to install a different file manager to use (I don't care all that much for Thunar in Xfce, either).

vbrummond · #18 Post by **vbrummond** » 2013-05-22 14:51

anastasis wrote:Cinnamon. I'm sold on it. I don't care if it's a Mint fork. It's just flat better. So I've betrayed the cause. I don't care. Cinnamon actually makes gtk3 functional. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Hey, its in Debian, so it's DFSG compliant, no worries.

I am rethinking KDE. The desktop itself is ok however: The only bloaty software I really need is a Email/Calendar/Contacts/Notes kind of PIM application. I don't like Thunderbird/Icedove, so its either Evolution or KDEPIM, and KDEPIM is terribly buggy garbage.

Evolution works fine.

dasein · #19 Post by **dasein** » 2013-05-22 15:16

vbrummond wrote:KDEPIM is terribly buggy garbage.

Just in case you don't know, Debian devs have deliberately held back portions of KDEPIM (including KMail) because of buginess. So on the off chance that you are letting your experience with/in SUSE color your choice, it might be worth double-checking KDEPIM in Debian.

(Not sayin' that Debian's KDEPIM suite is bugfree... just an observation.)

bwat47 · #20 Post by **bwat47** » 2013-05-23 13:50

The main reason I don't use KDE is because for a long time kwin has had a bug where its compositing tears on intel ironlake/sandybridge/ivybridge near the top of the screen (even with vsync on), which is really annoying when watching fullscreen video. I tried using smplayer with gl outout and setting kwin to turn off compositing when smplayer was open, but for some reason that only removed tearing for certain videos (4:3 aspect ratio videos gave me tearing everywhere, very strange...), and VLC's GLX output cannot remove tearing at all on intel because it does not page-flip. The only other option is the intel xorg TearFree option but it has terrible performance. The bug is only fixed in the upcoming kde 4.11. If it wasn't for that I might be using KDE right now.

The other thing that annoys me about KDE is how dolphin handles network shares. It uses kio to browse them but it does not have the capability to mount them, which is a huge PIA because very few software properly supports kio. For example even KDE's default dragonplayer video player cannot open a video from a smb share in dolphin. the only player I've found that can is VLC (and not because it supports kio, only because it happens to have its own smb access module), but I have severe audio sync issues with vlc ever since version 2.0.4 so thats off the table (and the vlc developers just say "wontfix" and blame pulseaudio, even though every single other video player works flawlessly for me with pulseaudio, including older versions of VLC). putting the share in fstab is a huge pia and I don't find it to be an acceptable solution (this is a laptop and I don't always have it at home where it can access the share, so I want to be able to mount/unmount the share on demand as a user in my file manager, which I can't do this way). smb4k works for mounting them via gvfs, but its a rather buggy piece of software

. I really wish KDE would just allow us to mount the share instead of expecting all software to use kio, when the reality is that even kde software doesn't seem to fully support it and I haven't seen a single video player that can stream a video via kio. /rant

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