Le 18.09.2013 13:31, Richard Owlett a écrit :
Richard Owlett wrote:/Background [snip] /Questions 1. Given that I prefer LILO over GRUB and xfce over Gnome/lxde/kde, what GUIs should I investigate further. 2. Given that internet is effectively non-existent and internal/external disk space is effectively unlimited, how can I make as many as possible of the DE &/or WM on the distribution DVD simply available to experiment with?Thank you to all who replied. I was able to load multiple DE's/WM's and compare various permutations. What's the best?
There is no best solution that we can give you. i3 is probably the best solution for me, but will be the poorest solution for some other people for which Gnome3 will be the best. Which in turn will not even meet the requirements of KDE's users. Every user is different, so should be every Debian installation, at least for personal needs (and sometimes you have different needs depending on the hardware too... ). The only thing other people can do to help you is showing you other roads.
I still don't know. The exercise demonstrated that I had misconceptions about Debian "philosophy" and underlying structure [ e.g. led me to read more about package management].
This is Debian's philosophy as *I* see it: you will be able to choose all tools you want. Even the kernel, since you can use KFreeBSD ( ok it is recent, and maybe not fully tested, I do not know. I should try it someday. ) Debian is not a linux system, it is an operating system, which happen to be (often) relying on the linux kernel. This imply, for example, that systemd will probably not become the only one init system. Same for gnome for DEs or for grub2 for bootloaders (but, yes, they can be the default tool in a period of time).
I guess this is why Debian meet my needs: you can tinker things easily, and so learn a lot even if you have poor starting knowledge. But do not worry, it seem that on that list, everyone is still learning things regularly.