Re: Is "Debian desktop environment" identical to "GNOME" upon installation?

[Peter Ehlert <pb21a@sdi-baja.com>]

On 11/5/21 4:50 AM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I did some test by installing 2 identical virtualbox instances (EFI 
> turned on) with the same netinst image <debian-11.1.0-amd64-netinst.iso>.
>
> I typically use XFCE, so I wanted to test if leaving "Debian desktop 
> environment" marked would affect or not my XFCE installation.
>
> It does.
>
> a)
> | [ ]  Debian desktop environment
> | [*]    XFCE
>
> b)
> | [*]  Debian desktop environment
> | [*]    XFCE
>
> Using (b), I end up with 12 more installed packages.  I checked that 
> there weren't any available upgrades after installing both (apt-get 
> update && apt-get upgrade showed 0).
>
> The offending list is:
>
> hv3
> libsqlite3-tcl
> libtcl8.6
> libtk-img
> libtk8.6
> tcl
> tcl-tls
> tcl8.6
> tcllib
> tk
> tk-html3
> tk8.6
>
> Maybe there's a bug somewhere in tasksel?

I consider it Faulty Design.

there is no "Debian desktop environment"... from my superficial testing 
it is kinda "Gnome Lite"
(and in My Opinion gnome desktop is rather hateful).

Being selected by default is a Huge design flaw.

a simple "select a desktop environment" text message with something like 
"without a desktop you only get a terminal" as a suggestion for the 
uninformed would be far superior.

BTW: I only use net-install because I don't want all that cruft.

PS: hunting down all swap partitions on very drive and setting them to 
Format by default is also a real pain in the tush.

> I did some tests running tasksel again after the installation, and 
> were intriguing, but I'll hold the deeper tests for after this is 
> inspected.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alex