How long has it been since I ran Debian Desktop, rather than Server? I forget. Debian has been my go-to server environment since . . . well, it’s probably the only server OS I’ve used in serious production contexts, apart from a few stints on shared hosting and I don’t know what they all were. But as time goes by I’ve been thinking of using it as my primary environment for everything that needs internet connectivity, but never quite got round to it. Last night an opportunity arose to try it on an old-ish laptop which threatens to become unusable for its primary purpose because:
So it looks like it’s goodbye to Ubuntu. Debian then, maybe?
As I write, after a long overnight and a lengthy sleep, my memory is just starting to get hazy on some of the details but I can note some points.
- For some reason I couldn’t write the i386 netinstall image to a USB stick, on the same setup that I’ve happily been writing AMD64 netinstall images to USB on for years. This isn’t a new problem; it happened with Ubuntu i386 16.04 too. No idea why, and it again reduces me to writing a CD for what should be a single use.
- Debian 12 is a much easier installation than some previous versions, and seems to recognise and use all the hardware on this old-ish Compaq laptop quite happily.
- The installer asks for a root password and prompts you to set up an administrator account, then presumably expects you to use the administrator account to set up anyone else. Well and good. Maybe?
- As usual, the options presented of installing different graphical environments are a little bewildering, but OK. Since this laptop has been using Gnome in Ubuntu for over a decade, that’s the starting option.
- Now I bump into that last ‘maybe’ above. The administrator account can’t access its users settings without authorisation. This took a lot of random 3a.m. faffing about to figure out, but it turns out that in order to do anything requiring authorisation, you have to use the root password. Not the administrator password. That’s only for logging in the administrator account. And even the non-administrator account can authorise anything if they have the root password. This is not my usual approach to things. Also, the administrator account isn’t in sudoers. So what’s the point of having an administrator account? You can
su root
from anywhere, but you still get ‘can’t do x without an effective root’ warnings at times. You can’tlogin root
. You can’tsudo
anything because no-one’s in sudoers. (Butsudo
is there.) I’m sure there’s lots of to-and-fro arguments about security design behind all this but wouldn’t it be nice if it was all just explained somewhere immediately visible? - Anyway, Gnome is rather different than yesterday’s version so a whole new round of figuring-out will be needed. I like some of the changes (but that’s me not its actual user) as I did think the older version was a bit clunky. Not convinced this is entirely better though. In particular I’m noticing some graphical toggle switches that don’t clearly indicate whether they’re on or off, just change colour. That is unacceptably bad UI design. I mean, putting it simply, that by itself would disqualify it from use in any work environment where I was in charge of things, because you can’t put your staff in a position where they can’t tell whether or not they’re agreeing to things. And it transpires that in this Gnome, Firefox uses this widget for checkbox, at least sometimes.
- It’s ‘Firefox’, not ‘Iceweasel’.
(I mean, I say
because it’s one less thing to explain but I did kind of like the thought of an iceweasel.)
- I decided in advance that I wasn’t going to do this installation on the current hard drive because excessive caution maybe. So I used the old drive I took out of it a few years ago. Well, guess what? The backups performed using Ubuntu’s Déja Dup can’t be read using this Déja Dup.
Sometimes excessive caution still isn’t enough! I can put the newer drive in a drive dock and copy everything we want off it for now. But I’m suddenly a lot less keen on Déja Dup. (Later: This might just be a permissions thing; I went back to look and now I can’t even see the backup disc contents. But then, why could I first time?)
- It should have been possible at this stage just to get the one file off the drive that was needed to test internet functions, but here a curious point arose. I copied the file to the new installation’s ~/Desktop. It didn’t appear on the Desktop. I opened the file browser and found it there, in ~/Desktop. Too much to think about; we just tested Firefox. It’s more or less good.
- I had a short break, and decided to tackle the automatic login thing. The option to just set that in a user’s settings seems to have gone, but it turns out you can write a line in a Gnome config file — but that file isn’t called the same thing in Debian as the Gnome site suggests. It’s
/etc/gdm3/daemon.conf
. With that written, and a command to reload the configuration, a restart fixes it. [1] (Later I found that this doesn’t stop them having to use their password to log in after sleep but that may be another setting I’d have to find.) -
So what’s up with ~/Desktop? I just wanted a switch to enable files to appear on the desktop, which I recall there being, once. I found a bunch of forums telling you slightly contradictory things about how to do this, including that it needs an extension installed but it wasn’t clear how to actually install or use this extension or what it was extending. Then I found a comment which I think clarifies the subject quite effectively. The commenter tells us that files on the Desktop are a bad thing because everyone makes a mess of them, and they’re invisible under all those open windows, and therefore the facility was removed from Gnome in 2011 so don’t even ask. Even if ‘some people downstream’ (aka Ubuntu and its users) decided they still wanted it. Right.
Obviously, when you think about it:
- no-one ever managed to make a mess of any filesystem location other than ~/Desktop, no matter how bad their organisational skills,
- no-one ever invented a quick switch in desktop-based environments to temporarily hide all your windows while you did something underneath,
- no-one ever invented multiple workspaces so you could keep one empty purely for working on your desktop even before the hide-windows switch was invented,
- no-one ever opened a window at ~/Desktop just to quickly sort something out like dragging and dropping into a working application window, except perhaps Gnome who may have invented the idea that you should do that for everything all the time, [2]
- etc. There are probably more use cases than I can think of but of course — none of them are real!
But yes, that clarifies matters. The Gnome position, as represented by this commenter (who may not be an official rather than officious representative of the Gnome project) is essentially that we’re not good enough for them. So I think I’m likely to bow to their superior judgement and use something else.
There may be updates to come in which we try KDE or something.
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Notes
- Yes, automatic logins. Not everyone is good at handling complicated login processes. Software developers generally seem to be responding with arguments about good security, which collectively amount to the conclusion that some people shouldn’t be allowed to use the internet, at much the same time as social and commercial services, with government approval, are insisting that everything must be done by internet, even phones. Slight mismatch there? ↖
- I know, they didn’t invent the desktopless environment. It was a feature of at least some versions of CDE if I remember. Is Gnome secretly run by an ancient order of CDE purists who’ve been trying to make the world good and pure and their way since the 1980s? Probably not, but maybe they inhabit the comments sections. ↖
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