Re:Debian 10 “Buster” Released
by teddyh on Saturday July 06, 2019 @08:43PM
(#20372916)
As I understand it, it was mostly a technical result of Gnome being the default desktop, and Gnome defaulting to Wayland.
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I'm honestly astounded by how much fallout is generated by GNOME alone: GNOME strongly integrating with systemd pushing systemd itself[1] onto major distributions, now GNOME forcing Wayland.
Hell, RHEL even dropped KDE support entirely in version 8.
I'm not saying change is inherently bad, but I'm amazed how much change is caused by a single project.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/10/msg00578.html
Re:Debian 10 “Buster” Released
by dependenttypes on Sunday July 07, 2019 @04:42AM
(#20374166)
GNOME is not even that good even, not from a programming perspective (glib/gobject/gtk hell) nor from a usability perspective (features being removed left and right, high memory usage, etc). I personally think that tiling WMs do it way better, but even things like openbox and KDE are just more usable than GNOME. I am surprised that it is still the default in so many distros, something related to tradition i presume?
> something related to tradition i presume?
If only there were some sort of (M) Advanced Traditional Environment they could default to instead..
disclaimer: i probably haven't given any recent gnome version a fair shot
I doubt it; they already maintain patchsets for a lot of their packages, and one to change what gnome defaults to would be trivial. This was a deliberate move.
You can only see it as a “move” if you consider Debian to be a single reasoning entity. But consider: the person making such a patchset would be the Gnome maintainers, and they would not really have an incentive to do so; Gnome upstream probably changed the default for a reason, and the maintainers of the Debian Gnome package, being voluntary maintainers, probably are philosophically aligned with Gnome upstream. The rest of Debian, like the package maintainer who chooses what Desktop Environment should be the default, can not make such a change to the Gnome package without a quite adversarial process involving the Technical Committee, and in practice this process is rarely used, and even when used, rarely successful.
Therefore, it is the expected result that Debian should follow the upstream Gnome into using Wayland.