Re: new tasksel

[Michael Gilbert <mgilbert@debian.org>]

On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 10:52 PM, Joey Hess wrote:
> I have made some significant changes to tasksel, that will need changes
> elsewhere. I plan to upload this to unstable pretty soon, feedback permitting.
[...]
>    │    [*] Desktop environment                                             │
>    │    [*] ... Xfce                                                        │
>    │    [ ] ... GNOME                                                       │
>    │    [ ] ... KDE                                                         │

This looks pretty awesome.

Those options aren't very understandable to users as yet unfamiliar
with open source desktops.  I would like to suggest (stuff in
parenthesis not meant to be shown)

  [*] Desktop environment
  [ ] ... Minimal Desktop (task-xfce-desktop --no-install-recommends)
  [*] ... Standard/default Desktop (task-xfce-desktop)
  [ ] ... Comprehensive Desktop (task-gnome-desktop)

This excludes kde, but it's not clear to me how to describe the
difference between kde and gnome succinctly without using the
(meaningless to some users) acronyms.

A note about Minimal Desktop, task-xfce-desktop is about 1500 MB
installed with a lot of stuff I don't really want or need.  So, at
least on my machines, I always unselect Desktop Environment during
installation, then later "apt-get install task-xfce-desktop
--no-install-recommends", which results in about a 400 MB installation
and more like 150 MB download.  I think a lot of users prefer this
kind of minimalism, so it would be nice to make that easily available.

Best wishes,
Mike