Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Debian Desktop Environment experience is dropping?

As I have been checking deeper into distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE there's one thing that Debian still lacks. It feels really unpolished compared to the former.

Why?

In Ubuntu, if you use Files (GNOME file manager)  right-click and try to share a folder it will ask you to download Samba and configure it for you.

In Debian I would get funny errors because Samba isn't configured at all. This was one of my experiences with Dolphin that I would right-click and try to share a folder with the other Windows computers and it wouldn't

What is Debian? It's something that I've been pondering for a while. Debian's site doesn't have a welcoming design like Fedora one does. The community (forums) seems like a passive-aggressive sort of bunch (although honestly it feels like it's like that with most Linux communities). So is Debian just a distribution template for other based distributions to copy? Maybe.

Another example, this time unrelated to KDE is the GNOME experience in Debian jessie/testing. Sure, you would argue that it's unreleased. Fine, it's a total valid point but hear me out:

I couldn't for the life of me CHANGE the language to Spanish in GNOME Debian. I went to the expected place to change the settings but the option wasn't there at all. In Ubuntu, it will give you the option to install the Spanish language package and make that user use the Spanish language while other accounts maintains the English language as default.

The GNOME 3.12 account integration with other services was well done. Of course, in Ubuntu it was just plain better.

I haven't checked Fedora yet. I'm actually downloading it right now to see how polished is Fedora.

As much as people hate Ubuntu, because it seems to be the popular thing to do Ubuntu does a lot of things right that the desktop experience needs. You can hate it all you want, it won't remove the fact that Ubuntu just wins hands down.

This is not about "well, I prefer is the distribution would let me configure the installed software rather than it making the decisions by itself". Fine, you like to waste time and configure your own stuff. That's great, but you are missing the point. This so called "newbie distro" is aiming to be things that other distributions couldn't do and that is to bring a easy to use GNU/Linux desktop and see that sharing, installing printers, etc is working as expected.


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