Debian Stable Xfce / nonfree - user req. for review of some bundled utilities / applications
My apologies in the original post below apply to this reposting to
debian-xfce, I just found this list on further checking for the most
appropriate one, and hope this list is perhaps more suitable than the
general debian-devel.
I am not subscribed to list debian-xfce.
Regards
Robert Jones
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:09:06 +0000 (UTC)
From: RW Jones <rwj@SDF.ORG>
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian Stable Xfce / nonfree - user req. for review of some bundled
utilities / applications
Apologies if this is posted to the wrong mailing list, it seemed the best place
for the basic level of enquiry/request.
A while back I tested on a few laptops
debian-live-10.7.0-amd64-xfce+nonfree
and am interested to try the Xfce flavour of the next major Stable edition
which I gather is scheduled for release this year, with a view to installing
it.
The following reflected some of my impressions of the above nonfree release.
For most of what follows, I imagine the answer could be just "well you have the
option to install suchlike, so why don't you just do that?" Which is indeed the
case, except there are in the mix a few items that might reasonably be
considered kind of anomalous, plus the risk of the tyro/intermediate user
hosing the system by installing otherwise than from the Debian depository e.g.
ScanTailor Advanced off github or elsewhere (below).
1. for the above edition specifically, installation: I didn't see any means of
selecting another kernel; it failed to boot a P4 desktop with 2GB RAM and a
hard reboot was required as no exit option.
2. Debian Reference links in browser only to Italian and Spanish versions - no
English or other versions. Why?
3. desktop and specifically the icons looking more like clunky VGA -vs- SVGA.
The tested laptops had AMD radeon gpu and dmesg showed firmware loaded etc but
brief twiddling adjustments to desktop settings to reduce icons/font sizes made
no or little difference. (I can't define this better than to have the SVGA look
instead of the VGA look - is there a Xfce compatible utility that serves that
purpose and/or which can be bundled with the release?)
4. "Start" / applications menu lists as terminals:
i) Thai x Terminal
ii) UXTerm
iii) Xfce Terminal
iv) XTerm
v) Multilingual Terminal
vi) Terminal Emulator
Yet despite all that surplusage of terminals (why?!) some basic system-like
utilities seem to be missing (did I miss any?) e.g.
grsync GUI for sync to synchronise folders, make backups etc and.or maybe
CrashPlan
part / gparted
package-update-indicator
snapper or timeshift
stacer
A utility to adjust desktop definition as above re: the SVG -vs- VGA look.
The netrunner, Puppy (various) distributions seem to have a small sprinkling
of useful utilities and common applications. But they don't have the same
Debian backing and reliability.
Some basic entertainment or productivity applications are visible, but notable
omissions might be e.g.
Audacity audio editor
doublecommander, muCommander, spacefm or similar as extra or alternative to
Thunar which like MS Windows Explorer lacks a lot of functionality
GIMP (for some reason included in Mate desktop version and not Xfce) -
LibreOffice Draw is not a substitute.
gpg for checking those binary etc sigs
keepassxc for accessing your MS Windows dbase of logins
mhwaveedit wav and mp3 editor using LAME
NoteCase outliner or maybe Osmo organizer
Transmission or other torrent client and ytdl
PDFsam for editing PDFs
Scan Tailor Advanced
https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced (the older version from which it
is branched seemed to have lost its maintainer the last time I looked about a
year ago, or maybe I didn't understand the email contact protocol).
VLC (there is Parole music player which is ok, Quod Libet music player which
doesn't have a progress bar - why include it?)
WINE
Anyway I hope some or all of this could be reviewed. And no, it's not intended
as trolling. Bit more of a cri de coeur.
btw thanks for producing a Stable distribution which in successive minor
editions at least has managed to boot three different types of laptops for
testing purposes and even deployed their external monitors without needing to
fiddle with settings. Which is quite a bit more than a significant proportion
of the distributions I tried off DistroWatch managed to do.
Regards,
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