Debian Beckons Ubuntu Refugees to Come Home
Dissatisfaction continues over Ubuntu's choice of the Unity Interface as default and, in the most recent release, no obvious way to return to the old Gnome desktop.
Long time Ubuntu users have been complaining loudly about Unity's lack of stability, limited options and an overall unfinished feel. Distros that have watched Ubuntu gobbling up the Linux mind-share are suddenly getting a second look by unhappy Ubuntu users seeking alternatives to Unity.
Ubuntu started life as a simplified Debian with an emphasis on desktop usability. Recent Ubuntu releases seem focused on blazing their own trail toward a touchscreen, cloud enabled, widget driven environment. This may prove to be a very forward thinking plan, but it leaves traditional Gnome users hungering for their familiar desktop environment.
I decided to take another look at Ubuntu's parent, Debian. They offer live cd/dvds so I downloaded the i386 dvd .iso of the current stable release 6.0, aka 'Squeeze'. (All the Debian releases are named after characters from the 'Toy Story' movies.)
As a test machine, I scrounged up an ancient Dell Inspirion 1150. This dinosaur sports a 30 GB harddrive, 2.6 GHz processor, Wifi and 512 MB of RAM. Although I love my bling, I did not test compiz on this box due to the low specs.
Debian calls itself "The Universal Operating System" and nothing beats its support for a wide variety of hardware and architectures. Sound, video and ethernet were configured and worked automagically from the live cd.
Clicking the Install icon opens a graphical installer which walks the user through the usual steps: language, location, keyboard and timezone. Enter user and administrator passwords, computer and host names.
The partitioner offers a simple, guided install for a range of configurations. More advanced setup options are available by selecting 'Manual install.
The installation is essentially the same as most gnome-gui based installers and virtually painless.
The desktop is plain, vanilla Gnome 2 with a cartoonish space wallpaper (see above). There are many more wallpapers included by default and Ubuntu users will recognize many beautiful favorites, including 'Cosmos' the space slide show.
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