It’s no secret that I hate GNOME. What might surprise you is that I love the idea behind the GNOME3 desktop; it’s just the implementation that frustrates me. GNOME has managed to dumb down so much of their desktop and pen the user with so many frustrating limits that I would rather use a different environment than be aggravated with GNOME.

I could never get into Debian, because every ISO image people insisted were amazing, that I just had to try, ran GNOME3. This was perhaps the most limiting factor to my trying and liking Debian.

Imagine my shock when I read that GNOME is no longer the default desktop of Debian!? Now the default desktop is XFCE! They aren’t even using GDM as the default log-in manager anymore, swapping that out for LightDM.

Considering the fact that GNOME3 has practically been Debian’s flagship desktop since the beginning of GNOME3, I find it amazing that Debian has done this. The reasons for doing this are “complex and subjective” but it appears that Debian was looking for a desktop environment that would fit on a CD, something which GNOME cannot do.

I think they made a good choice. Now they have XFCE, which is a desktop environment designed for productivity, which loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources (a bunch of qualifiers I could never say about GNOME).

Perhaps I should try Debian again.