Debian for desktop - gnome in usnstable/experimantal more stable than in testing ?
Hi
I would like to share some interesting experience about using debian
as desktop system.
I have been using debian as my desktop system for several years.
Lately, becouse I gained access to internet, i upgraded my system to
the latest testing distribution of debian (etch, with the Gnome 2.10
environment).
Gnome worked quite unstable, destkop was hanging in different
situations, for example
trying to download some file in different web browsers (firefox,
epiphany) . Totem didn't want even to launch, saying something about
network connection error.. or just not to start without displaying
reason.
Than, experimentally, I upgraded the gnome desktop environment to
experimental/unstable with the command:
apt-get install -t experimental gnome-desktop-environment
and now, when gnome 2.12 is installed it works much more stable (only
one hang till
now, that I couldn't reproduce) and totem launches and works now.. So
it seems than gnome from experimental/unstable now works better than
from testing..
At the end I would like to share my thoughts, and some ideas about
debian development. Maybe debian development model should be verified,
at least for desktop use. A user like me expects from desktop system
to have as up-to-date as possible desktop software (gnome, kde, xfce
etc..), tools like dia, openoffice.org and others..
Maybe it would be good to take look at other distributions, for
example ubuntu, learn
something and adopt some good idea's from that, for example - stable
core and very
up-to-date other software (at your own risk..) or from gentoo - allow
optimazation
for specific hardware.
Trying to bring all the debian distribution to stable state takes long time,
and the time seems to be longer from year to year. This is perhaps
becouse of that
debian's growth. It gets bigger and bigger and perhaps more difficult
to bring it to stable state.
I think it would be good if a desktop user could choose debian system that have
the following properties:
-stable core system
-latest desktop software (gnome, kde, xfce, openoffice.org... etc)
-optimized for specific hardware (or ability to compile and optimize)
Maybe it would be good idea not to maintain big separate
distributions (unstable, testing, stable), but just individual
versions of packages or package groups as stable, testing, unstable,
for example.
It also could be good to replace the "unstable" name with "latest" or
something like this, since it could be more stable than testing
distribution in some cases.
Best regards
Radoslaw Warowny
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