Hello All First off I don't intend this as flamebait and hope it will not be taken as such. I'm just a long-term Debian user looking to bring a topic up for discussion.
At issue is the apropriateness of a desktop that refuses to run on a vast ammont of graphics hardware as the default for The Universal Operating System. I just downloaded the Fedora based Gnome 3 live CD and gave it a try on the various machines around the house. Gnome Shell was slow with Nouveau on two relatively modern machines in the house. Gnome Shell failed to work at all on an old Thinkpad with Savage graphics. I'm sure it will work better on the Nvidia machines with the propritary drivers or with some time given for further development on both Gnome Shell and the Nouveau drivers. For the old Thinkpad, I doubt it ever will. Even if free drivers for platforms that support display compositing are up to snuff by the time of the next release, what about platforms that never supported it and never will? Display compositing is pretty much limited to AMD64, x86 and some later PPCs isn't it? How many of the following support display compositing as required by Gnome Shell? * kFreeBSD * KVM (Debian's prefered virtualization solution if I'm not mistaken) and other VMs * Various ARM tablets and notebooks * other archetectures that have their own graphics hardware with no compositing support I'm not going to come out saying that switching to KDE or XFCE or LXDE or any othe solution would be preferable, or even that continuing to use Gnome isn't preferable. I'd just like to see this given some thought and discussion. Again, I've seen enough flaming on this subject and don't want to contribute to starting any more. thanks, JN. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
