Steve Lamb wrote:
Or the system is going to have multiple users who might want different DEs.
And if that's the case then you select both of them during the install.
I still haven't
uninstalled Gnome, something I've been meaning to do for a long time, but
haven't had the willpower to spend that much time hunting down every last
unneeded package.
Hardly Debian's fault there.
Except that Debian put Gnome there when all I selected was "Desktop
environment." Come on, you know that Linux users tend to value specificity.
WHICH desktop environment? I would be very happy to see the tasksel setup show
exactly what is being installed, e.g.
* Mail server (Exim)
* Web server (Apache 2)
* Desktop environment (X.org, KDE, Gnome)
* DNS server (Bind 9)
And the like. Sure, you can always opt for the
select-nothing-and-apt-get-it-later approach, but let's be realistic. At least
let me know what *exactly* I'm signing up for so I can avoid it. And really,
how bad can a separate option for KDE and Gnome be? I mean, while we're
getting KDE and Gnome, why not icewm, xfce4, and fluxbox? Why should we stop
with two bloated environments when we can have two bloated environments and a
million lightweight ones? Are we trying to see how much space we can burn?
How hard can it be to give the user a choice during the install, and why is
that such a stupid idea according to you?