I'm struggling with debian+gnome for almost 2 months now, and unfortunately the incredible amount of bugs like weird mouse/window behavior and incredibly bad plugins seem to be winning. But before heading back to windows (which i would realy like to avoid), i decided to give debian another shot, but this time with xfce desktop environment. Do you think it would work better? Has anyone here ever had these or other kind of problems with gnome and switched to another de? If It doesnt work out I would probably try Mint before windows, but I realy want to stick woth Debian. Looking forward to your opinions! Xfce is amazing and pretty solid 'out-of-box'.
I've just installed on my Debian Sid with XFCE4 network manager, but I have a problem, no wireless connection are shown. Network Manager doesn't show Wireless connection. Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01) Subsystem: AzureWave Device 2047 Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge.
That being said I have spent countless hours customizing it to my preferences. My guess is that you will like it. There's a FEW rough corners but nothing that's a show-stopper. The 'panel' system that they have for customizing the UI is outstanding and flexible.
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I also find it to be incredibly snappy and light-weight. If you do go Xfce just be aware that sometimes you'll see some tearing issues - I've been able to overcome those multiple times by following the gist of -. You could have use a hardware compositing switch like this, for AMD graphics, /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-radeon.conf Section 'Device' Identifier 'Radeon' Driver 'radeon' Option 'TearFree' 'on' Option 'DRI' '3' Option 'AccelMethod' 'glamor' EndSection Check whether tearfree is enabled ``` grep -i tearfree /var/log/Xorg.0.log example output 17.302 (.) RADEON(0): Option 'TearFree' 'on' 20.962 (.) RADEON(0): TearFree property default: on ``` For intel graphics (even if you have bumblebee nvidia graphic card): For Nvidia graphics screen tearing. One other thing I forgot to mention since it's a total 'edge-case' is that I am able to run VERY unique monitor setups with it. Other solutions like Gnome were hell for this and often bugged out when doing custom xrandr work - specifically panels would never position/stretch right on switching monitor configs, etc. My daily driver is heavily modified T430, and I run a 1:1 aspect ratio on.
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XFCE does SUPER well and stays VERY low on system resource utilization (memory, CPU, etc.)! Maybe two more things - just thought of this. I come from a heavy design background and I am SUPER picky on UIX for myself. XFCE is as-close to a 'pixel-perfect' solution that I've been able to find without hella bloat. The only widget/panel that I use that's not super configurable is the battery one. Which meh w/e.
Needless to say I'm a huge advocate! Feel free to PM me if you have any onboarding questions that you can't find answers to online =). I can't stand Gnome, either. Luckily, we have several complete desktop environments to choose from. I use MATE personally but Xfce, KDE and Cinnamon are also popular. Lots of people don't go with a desktop environment at all, but just use a standalone window manager along with optional helpers for things like panels and docks, e.g.
Quite frankly, I've never met a single person that actively chooses to use Gnome. In my opinion, it's a shame that it's the default. That said, the nice thing about Debian is that you get a choice of desktop right at install time.
I think any of the options would be better than Gnome. You should definitely give one or more a try. To me, GNOME-Shell might be a sensible option for a tablet, but I have a computer with a mouse and keyboard and multiple monitors. I dumped GNOME-Shell in either 2011 or 2012 (gave it a few shots periodically, but it had never really changed). XFCE is decent, as is Cinnamon. I'm using Plasma (KDE) for a year, but will likely drop it and switch back to Cinnamon.
Enlightenment can be an interesting palette cleanser, but too flashy for my taste (but had used it for windowing with GNOME2). I'm not too sure how heavy Gnome is these days? Last time I tested it, it used about 600mb RAM when doing absolutely nothing. Not ideal when my hardware limit is 2gb. Anyway, XFCE is so much lighter, and IMO way more fun to use as I'm a fan of tinkering with themes / configs. Regarding bugs with Gnome, I wouldn't be able to verify this as I didn't use that DE long enough. If you have RAM to spare, I'd strongly recommend KDE if you like your DE to look more polished, if not, XFCE is perfect.
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