On 08/31/2013 06:07 AM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
On Sat, 2013-08-31 at 07:01 -0400, Thod Motte wrote:Thanks to debian and Gnome 3 for making my desktop as buggy and unstable as Windows 95 was in 1997 and less customizable. I'm just going to revert to squeeze, that desktop actually worked.Don't! Install Xfce, IMO the best DE that can be used as "successor" for GNOME 2. If people should mention Cinnamon and Mate, don't waste your time with those GNOME forks, if you shouldn't be happy to try out new things. Xfce isn't GNOME 2, but it's ok.
What's wrong with MATE?The problem with Xfce is that they develop and add new features to it very, very slowly, that, to modernize it and keep it as usable as more frequently updated desktops you have to install a lot of outside packages. Xfce hasn't done anything interesting in years, and I've seen big bugs in Xfce that still need fixing that are even more glaring than most of MATE's.
I like MATE because they've kept the (Excellent.) GNOME 2 desktop alive, though they could probably do better in adding new stuff, though that will be their plan eventually. Right now they're focused on completely branching MATE off of the dead GNOME 2 codebase.
I do think Cinnamon could be loads better, but it's not terrible, either.I used to actually be a big KDE user. I still like it but I've found it's gone from being one of the fastest, but still flexible desktop environments around to being one of the absolute slowest.
Anyway... to the OP, I don't know why you'd use Debian Stable on a desktop system. Also, it's not the Debian developers' fault that GNOME 3 is a minefield of terrible ideas, changes for changes sake, tabletitis, and failure to listen to users (Gee, sounds almost like Windows 8, doesn't it?). That's on the GNOME developers. The Debian developers are not the GNOME developers. The only thing I fault the Debian developers for is sticking with GNOME as their official desktop when it was pretty well-known by then what a pile of crap it became.
My recommendation is not to fall back to Squeeze but to actually use Debian Testing (Which is better for desktops, Stable is better used on servers.) and use some other desktop: Xfce (Despite it's slow-as-molasses development cycle.) , MATE from its Debian repository, LXDE, even KDE. Just... run away. Run far, far away from GNOME 3.