On Mon, Nov 03, 2025 at 12:43:11 -0500, Tech_Research wrote: > What's the difference between Debian & Debian Gnome?
You've probably stumbled across the "Live" images. Debian has a variety of installation/Live images. The basic installer image, which you get if you go to the main debian.org web site and click the gigantic download button, is called "netinst", which stands for "network installation". Contrary to the name, it doesn't *actually* need a network connection to install. The netinst image is small, and contains a rather spartan set of packages. When you install, you go through a basic hardware detection and disk formatting process, and then you select from a set of "tasks". By default, the task for "Desktop Environment" is selected, but you can change this. Any tasks that are selected for installation will correspond to a set of packages that will be installed. If those packages are on the installation medium, then they're installed from there. Otherwise, the installer will attempt to download them from the Internet. The "netinst", being small, will end up downloading a large number of packages if you select a Desktop Environment, because those packages do not fit within the installer image. So, that's the normall installer. In addition to that installer, there's a set of "Live" images, which are meant for booting and running a Debian system directly from some medium, such as a DVD or a USB thumb drive. Each Live image has a different user interface configured. There's one with GNOME, one with KDE, one with XFCE, and so on. The environment you get when you boot the Live image will be what it says on the label. The Live images have an installer as well, but not it's not the regular Debian installer. It's an alternative installer, and it works a bit differently. If you install from a Live image, the resulting system has some differences, compared to a normal installation. They're pretty subtle, but every once in a while, someone is surprised by them. I'm guessing that when you say "Debian GNOME", what you actually have is a Debian Live image with GNOME configured on it.
