I've got no beef with GNOME 3. But I still have two desktop environments installed on this Debian Wheezy system. Today I used the other one, Xfce 4.8.

Nothing to complain about. Xfce in Debian is always a little rough around the edges, most of which I've smoothed out at this point. I'm looking at Xubuntu and Fedora's Xfce spin as potential candidates for my next install.

About the only thing that's not working great in Debian Wheezy with Xfce is the touchpad on this Lenovo G555. In Wheezy with GNOME 3, the touchpad is preconfigured in such a way that it doesn't randomly delete text like it does when running Windows 7 (or previous Linux systems, for that matter). Something in this GNOME setup is taking care of the terrible Alps touchpad on this laptop, and I wish I knew exactly what.

That's because in Xfce, the touchpad defaults to not working at all. That's not much of a problem because I rarely use it. But sometimes -- pretty much when I'm watching video -- I like to use the touchpad.

I've seen xorg hacks (thanks Linux Mint Debian users!) to turn on the touchpad for Xfce, but once I do this, I get the same poor touchpad performance in Xfce AND GNOME.

So right now I'm settling for great touchpad performance in GNOME, none in Xfce. Until I figure it out.

I lucked into a couple of these Staedtler Mars Lumograph 100 pencils. They're "artists' pencils," I presume. No eraser on the end.

One is an HB, which is equivalent to the standard No. 2 pencil lead. The other is a 2B.

They are made in Germany.

Construction is flawless. The wood is of high quality.

The leads are smooth and long-lasting. I can't complain.

• Read much more about the Staedtler Mars Lumograph at Pencil Revolution, Pencil Talk and PenciLog

• Apologies for the photograph. Again, it's a cell-phone image. I worked on it a bit in the GIMP to bump up brightness and contrast, and I used unsharp mask to sharpen it.

I haven't used OwnCloud much over the past few months. And I let my installation get old.

I just did an upgrade from 3.0.2 to 4.5.0 in a single operation. OwnCloud is complicated: The update consists of 4,562 files.

Once the files transferred, the system didn't work. But the fix was easy: OwnCloud 4.5.0 requires PHP 5.3. My shared hosting account defaults to PHP 5.2. PHP 5.3 must be called in the .htaccess file. I was doing that in version 3.0.2, but part of my upgrade included a new .htaccess file from OwnCloud.

I went into .htaccess, added my hosting provider's recommended code to invoke PHP 5.3, and OwnCloud 4.5.0 began working immediately.

One of the things about 4.5.0 that I'm most excited about is the ability to upgrade OwnCloud from within the application itself. Sure beats transferring 4,562 files over FTP.

The "fast" pace of Iceweasel/Firefox and Icedove/Thunderbird releases over the past couple of years has really thrown longer-term Linux distributions for a loop.

The Mozilla-coded apps quickly get very old, and it's harder and harder for Debian developers to patch those older versions with the latest security fixes when the upstream code leaves the distro's original version further and further behind.

And enterprises, educational institutions and people who like things to stay the same aren't terribly excited by applications that change versions from month to month, regardless of what actual changes are happening in the code. Never mind that those changes are often significant enough to break things built for a platform that is moving too quickly for many tastes.

Enter the Extended Support Release version of Firefox and Thunderbird. After seeing its Mozilla applications get really old really fast in Squeeze, Debian picked up on the ESR releases of Iceweasel and Icedove for Wheezy. That's what I see in CentOS, Scientific Linux and Stella as well, so it appears that even Red Hat Enterprise Linux has opted for ESR.

Sure there are features in the "consumer" version of Firefox (which Ubuntu follows even for its LTS release) that users of ESR will miss, but between stability in terms of functionality and knowing that these web-connected applications are fully patched, the peace of mind is well worth it.

Iceweasel 10.0.09esr just rolled onto my Debian Wheezy box. I'm glad to see it.