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The Buster experience continued with other DE's

enlightenment: 300mb after playing with composition got in down to 263mb. Light, lots of bling but as seems usual with enlightenment unstable! Windows froze requiring a log out. That said it performance wise it was fine. 7/10

mate:388mb usable by my granny. Complained about my screen but loaded it anyway. 6/10

lxde:308mb it seemed to load a bit of gnome cruft and would no doubt be much lighter if I removed gnome... may test that. lovely simple DE that anyone could use. 8/10

budgie: 540mb very basic ootb but much more usable speed wise. 6/10

plasma:plasma really struggled to load the monitor. very slow to start like over a minute or two. First time I got a black screem and waited. Eventually an option to select a monitor appeared. I clicked the wrong one and got a perminent black screen. I opened a tty and went in to .local/share/kscreen and deleted the file in there. Rebooted and tried again this time I selected the correct monitor and eventually got a desktop. Very slow to load up but once loaded works not to bad.. ps_mem showing 455mb Goodness knows what a full KDE would be like but no on my pay scale. 7/10

openbox: 270mb wtf is all the cruft being dragged in. Worked fine but felt like Usain Bolt and with a ball and chain 9/10

Gnome lost the ability to start synaptic and gparted but plasma could

Uninstalled reformatted the drive and reinstalled with no desktop

apt installed xorg rox curl firefox tint2 icewm mousepad spacefm and a few bits. Runs fine nice and quick but did need and hour to setup. Not got fittstool built yet as it complains about missing glib2 I suspect I need some dev files that I don't know the name of. I know it builds and works because I built it when I had the full desktop. pebkac Edit. fixed is installed some massive meta file by mistake so I guess it's still a pebkac!

icewm: 105mb! better but no cigar xorg is like 35mb of that as opposed to usually about 10 and xrandr show the infamous "laptop screen" so I suspect it may be an issue no matter what distro. Disabled the "laptop screen" with arandr damn I like that application. 9/10 edit rose to 120mb! wtf

All scoring imho and relate to the tested hardware and used Buster release only bla bla bla

Basically composting by default sucks and the installer should recommend a DE based on your hardware should you choose a desktop install.... anyway it's been an experience I may keep Buster on it to watch, along with exegnu (TDE) which absolutely flies as a full DE. Have fun and enjoy

what a gem of a post, thanks for the different comparisons. much appreciated. m not sure about openbox memory consumption though, on my vanilla netinstall its under 160mb and thats with a bunch of crap like at-spi-2, gconf, dconf, upowered, cgmanager, gnome-keyring etc

oswaldkelso wrote:Basically composting by default sucks

aye

oswaldkelso wrote:and the installer should recommend a DE based on your hardware should you choose a desktop install

hahaha never gonna happen

But yes TDE absolutely rocks!!

oswaldkelso wrote:The Buster experience continued with other DE's

interesting, well, for me anyway.
but how do I get icewm to work ??
did install it with apt install icewm
did nano /etc/X11/default-display-manager and changed gdm3 to icewm
did sudo dpkg-reconfigure icewm
did update-alternatives --config x-window-manager and selected icewm
rebooted in between each change, but no dice

fred44nl wrote:rebooted in between each change, but no dice

In login screen, you must choose icewm-session to have full experience with icewm.

oswaldkelso wrote:Gnome lost the ability to start synaptic and gparted

Nope: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=699438#p699438

You probably tried the Wayland session, that won't allow synaptic to start because it runs in an insecure manner and the Wayland devs actually give a crap, amazingly.

Gparted works in both the X-based and Wayland GNOME session though, at least on my 10-year-old X201 (which runs GNOME very smoothly btw).

fred44nl wrote:did nano /etc/X11/default-display-manager and changed gdm3 to icewm

Icewm isn't a display manager so you should probably change that back.

fred44nl wrote:did update-alternatives --config x-window-manager and selected icewm

The x-window-manager alternative is only used if you have no x-session-manager alternative installed so that won't really do anything.

Select icewm-session from GDM's login screen by using the little cog-wheel icon just underneath the login box.

On mine it is not a "cog wheel", but a little wrench thing,

=============

GarryRicketson wrote:On mine it is not a "cog wheel", but a little wrench thing

I think that's LightDM rather than GDM.

I've already advised Fred to switch from LightDM to GDM because the latter runs X as the normal user but LightDM runs X as root, which is bad.

Ok, any way, the option to select it should be there some where in the login screen,...
Mine is "lightdm".

GarryRicketson wrote:Ok, any way, the option to select it should be there some where in the login screen,...

yes, it is and you know what ??
I found it

Congratualtions

fred44nl wrote:I found it

Small successes lead us to greater victories.
Soon, you will be compiling your own kernels....just to go back to default one anyway because it worked just fine

Wheelerof4te wrote: Soon, you will be compiling your own kernels....

never, ever, ever

but what is the catch in icewm ??
not much different from LXDE or LXqt.
well, it is all a matter of taste.

want something different ??
have a look at Cinnamon.

not exactly a lightweight, but niccceeeeeee

fred44nl wrote:but what is the catch in icewm ?? not much different from LXDE or LXqt.

Do you feel the difference between DE and WM?

None1975 wrote:

fred44nl wrote:but what is the catch in icewm ?? not much different from LXDE or LXqt.

Do you feel the difference between DE and WM?

Fred is correct in the sense that both LXDE and IceWM provide a simple workspace: menu, taskbar, launchers, pager, tray, ... and no whiz bang graphics. Windows open and close. That's it. Simple.

The difference between LXDE and IceWM is the difference between automation and customization. LXDE offers a good out-of-the-box experience and graphical tools (like LXAppearance) that cater to your preferences. It works well and I use it on my phonetop, but it always leaves me wanting something more.

I use IceWM on my laptop. IceWM looks terrible out of the box. To make it look nice, you have to edit a bunch of text files by hand. But because it is so simple and easy to edit IceWM's configuration files, it is very easy to create the desktop that you want in IceWM.

The IceWM project was recently revived and Debian Buster offers the new version. The improvements are subtle, but it feels like silk.

WOW! This thing has gone in a new direction from what I, the OP, had in mind. Well. the good news is it is coming whether you guys want it or not. I just downloaded and installed "debian-buster-DI-rc2-amd64-DVD-1.iso" and it is improved.

Finally it has arrived.

But they tricked me: Yesterday I waited the whole day for the release and last time I checked just a few minutes before midnight. And today in the morning the news article claimed the new version was released on 6 July. Maybe there is some magic concerning time zones but I have the impression it would have been more adequate to date the release 2019-07-07 instead of 2019-07-06. It would be the prettier date anyway.

But of course this is not important at all. I am already installing it on my new device which should become my main workstation.

Onsemeliot wrote:Finally it has arrived. :)Maybe there is some magic concerning time zones but I have the impression it would have been more adequate to date the release 2019-07-07 instead of 2019-07-06. It would be the prettier date anyway.

This release date is in coordinated Universal Time format...

Congratulations Debian! Have the iso waiting for a test run soon as I get the time!