Rogério Brito wrote:
Well, this is a pretty OT question for a Debian mailing list, but does Ubuntu not work as well with an alternate DE or WM as Debian does?On 04/21/06 19:58, Steve Lamb wrote:And, of course, why there's UBUNTU and KUBUNTU. Waiting for XUBUNTU myself. ;)Indeed. I'm on the same boat here... After using "pure" ubuntu on an old laptop of mine I wouldn't expect it to run soooo poorly. With all the talk about Gnome getting leaner and snappier, with a focus on reducing the amount of RAM needed to run, I expected that it would be a nice thing to base a course of mine regarding Linux to some co-workers, but given that we don't live in the richest country of the world, our machines are not as fast as some developers think that they should be. I installed xubuntu and it worked much better. My only complaint regarding it was that I could not hibernate my system, as I could when I booted with Gnome. Actually, I'm right now with both installed on this "sacrificial" machine, but I am surely waiting for xubuntu to get slightly more polished... Regards, Rogério.
What I mean is, with Debian, you have various install options, assuming you are starting with the net install CD-ROM. You can use the task options presented during the install routine to choose a desktop system, a server system, a mail-server system, a "standard" system, etc. I prefer installing the standard (fairly minimal) system to the "desktop" choice because the latter installs so much that I don't want and would just have to remove later. I just add the desktop components I want using aptitude after the installation is complete.
Ubuntu now offers a "server" install option, which does not install X or any DE (no Gnome, which a standard Ubuntu install would provide, nor KDE nor XFCE, which standard installs of Kubuntu and Xubuntu would install, respectively). So can't you just forget Kubuntu and Xubuntu and use the regular Ubuntu disc to install a minimal system, then add what WM (or DE) you want after the fact? Or is your post implying that alternate WMs/DEs just don't work as well in (K)(X)Ubuntu as they do in Debian?
I guess you could say that Debian is somewhat "Gnome-centric" in that if you follow the standard prompts and install the standard desktop system from the installer, you wind up booting into a Gnome desktop. But it isn't, I don't think, as "Gnome-centric" as Ubuntu has been in the past, nor does Debian's defaulting to Gnome imply that other environments won't work just as well under Debian. Is the same not true for Ubuntu?
If not, that would seem to be a fairly significant difference between the two distributions (just to *try* to bring this back to the OP's question!). I remember back when I was first bewildered and overwhelmed by the sheer number of distros out there, one factor I decided was important to me was that a distro be relatively DE-agnostic. Many are not -- they pretty much lead you to one environment and often don't work very well with alternates. Even Mepis, which was the first Linux distro I ever tried, was back then wholly KDE-centric. Gnome barely worked under Mepis, and I don't think there were many alternatives to KDE available. This is often the case with smaller and/or newer distros -- they just don't have the developer/community power to support more than a few options, even if they have the desire to do so; or they're just too new to have had time to develop support for more. One thing in Debian's favor, if you're interested in exploring a wide range of options, is that Debian makes them as easily accessible as "aptitude install whateverboxwm."
-- Michael M. ++ Portland, OR ++ USA "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." --S. Jackson