Debian is boring. Releases happen every two years, give or take. Developers spend months and months chasing bugs while other Linux distributions crank out release after release.

But Debian gets better as it inches toward release. And if you're running the Stable distribution (Squeeze instead of Wheezy, still in Testing) you can enjoy the goodness for the next two years -- or three if you wish, as Stable gets an extra year of security patches as Old Stable after a new Stable version is released.

Debian isn't quite as boring as it is conservative. Even though Debian's Testing is more stable than many other distributions' actual releases, you can expect some bugs. And if you follow Testing, as I am at the moment, you get to see some of those bugs get fixed.

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I've been sampling Fedora 18 -- now in alpha -- via the live images mostly as a way to test and come to terms with GNOME 3.6.

I'm currently running GNOME 3.4.2 in Debian Wheezy, but I've wanted to know what was going to be so different in newer versions of the desktop environment.

I'm grappling with those differences, as you can read in posts right around this one. While it seems like this is time for GNOME 3 to settle in a bit, it looks like that will happen maybe a year from now.

Coming at this as a user of GNOME 3 (and I find myself actually liking the environment that many have avowed to leave behind), Fedora 18 is looking like a very good release for desktop users.

I've been comparing it to the Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix, which is sticking with a less-hobbled Nautilus 3.4 along with a GNOME 3.6 base. So far, Fedora 18 appears to be superior. It handles my hardware (and touchy Alps touchpad) better and seems more solid, even in its current alpha form.

Even though the first Ubuntu GNOME remix is a final release, it seems pretty unfinished, and I expect things to be a lot better if and when the Ubuntu 13.04 GNOME Remix is released.

But for now Fedora 18 looks like a very promising way to run a solid GNOME 3 system. Or as solid as it gets, anyway.

Note: Look at this page from the GNOME Project. It offers an ISO that includes GNOME 3.6. I've heard that it's Fedora with a newer GNOME. GNOME is also hosting ISOs for the Ubuntu 21.10 GNOME Remix.

And on the Getting GNOME page, GNOME recommends not only its own ISO but Fedora proper, OpenSUSE, Arch and Debian.

Going by what I read, Linux and BSD users are abandoning GNOME and Unity for ... Xfce.

They hate GNOME 3/Shell, they don't like what Ubuntu's done with Unity, and they're not crazy about KDE, either.

Enter Xfce. Back in the GNOME 2 days, I found that on a fast machine you really didn't gain much in desktop speed by picking Xfce over GNOME. But on slow, old hardware, Xfce sure could make a difference.

That means on new computers it all boils down to what you like. If Xfce does the job for you, use it.

With GNOME and Unity throwing out the "old" desktop paradigm for a new one that ostensibly helps the tablets and touchscreens none of us are using work better, anybody who wants to keep working in the same way they've been doing for decades is probably looking at Xfce and LXDE as the way going forward.

Some don't want any change, but most want evolution instead of revolution, and they don't want nonexistant tablets to dicate how they use their mouse-and-keyboard computers.

I get that.

Even Windows users are in this. Windows 8 probably won't throw out so much baby with bathwater, but the changes in the Microsoft desktop would ordinarily send geekier users scurrying toward Linux. Unity and GNOME 3 might be too much of a shock.

Enter Xfce.

It has more than enough features. It's fast. It's not undergoing a cataclysmic transformation. It doesn't care about tablets, touchscreens, smartphones or TVs. It's not trying to sell you services or get you to buy shit. It works like a desktop you know. (Like GNOME 2.)

Personally I haven't soured on GNOME 3. I still like it. But I also like having something I know will be there when my hardware isn't so new. A workhorse desktop.

It's here.

Already I like what I see in Xubuntu 12.10.

• The new Xfce 4.10 desktop environment with a network-friendly Thunar file manager

• Nice defaults and design (which you usually get in a distribution's "native" desktop environment but not so often without it)

What I don't like:

• The Alps touchpad in the Lenovo G555 is jumpy

Onto the next ...

Increasingly my litmus test on whether or not I can live with (and maybe embrace) a given Linux distribution on my Lenovo G555 comes down to one thing:

• Does it keep the cursor from jumping around the window and randomly deleting things when tap-to-click is invoked for the touchpad?

It's a sad commentary on the lousy Alps touchpad in this laptop, the state of operating system software and drivers (Windows 7 is among the OSes that can't deal) and my obsession with a machine that doesn't eat my work.

If I could only figure out how Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 (but not with Xfce 4.8, or Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity does it, I could take that information with me to make the touchpad work well in any damn Linux distro. I used the output of synclient -l in Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 and Xfce 4.8, doing a diff and using a synclient script to compensate for those differences in Xfce. I still get a jumpy Alps touchpad on the Lenovo G555. So GNOME is doing something else that doesn't show up in synclient. But what?

I can tell you that the Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix does not possess this secret touchpad sauce. I have to check Xubuntu 12.04 and 12.10, Fedora 18 (GNOME and Xfce).

Just this moment Ubuntu 12.04 suddenly highlighted this whole post and deleted all the text in a single keystroke. I used ctrl-z to bring it back, but Ubuntu 12.04 exhibiting this same disturbing behavior would mean that Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 stands alone in the "didn't eat my homework" department. More testing is in order.

Things in Ubuntu 12.04's favor are its LTS status -- it'll be around through 2017. I can't see myself using any release that long, but it could come to that, and the ecosystem around an Ubuntu LTS is formidable.

Sure I could turn off tap-to-click and make this whole problem go away. Since I use an external (generally wireless) mouse most of the time, this isn't as much of a deal-breaking problem as I'm making it out to be.

I'm in the Ubuntu 12.04/Unity live environment right now, and it looks pretty nice.

The menus appearing in the upper panel instead of in the application window is a "feature" of Unity that continues to disturb me. It doesn't help my productivity one little bit. I don't use Macs all that often, but Apple does this better.

The other design elements are less offensive. There's a refreshing attention to detail that for the most part helps more than it hurts.

The Dash is very responsive. In 12.04 it doesn't drill into application menus like it's supposed to do in 12.10 (I haven't tried it, hence the supposed reference) and basically re-implements what GNOME 3 does with it's desktop search for applications and files.

While the best outcome would be my figuring out the secret touchpad sauce and using it on any distribution in any desktop environment, I'd like the option of using GNOME, Xfce and even Unity without suffering from the cursor-jumping problem.

Right now I'm liking Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity. Given all the controversy over shopping lenses in 12.10, I expect that it'll have more users than it might have had otherwise.

A stable system with GNOME 3.6.x and/or Xfce 4.10 is also something I'd like to park on this laptop.

Note: The fix outlined below DOES NOT WORK for more than a day.

This fix is a bit brutal but DOES WORK:

To restore the desktop in my GNOME 3 user account, I ended up deleting the entire .config directory in my home directory.

That enabled me to log into GNOME Shell and have a working desktop. I lost a whole lot of settings in the process, so I recommend renaming .config as, say, config with no "dot," then logging in and eventually restoring the parts of the .config that you need.

Things I lost by killing out .config include my Chromium browser settings, all GNOME settings, gPodder settings, Gigolo settings ... and maybe more that I haven't yet discovered. Sure, I got my main account working with GNOME, but I should've backed up .config instead of killing it entirely.

For reference and disclosure's sake, here is the original post:

What happens is I log into GNOME 3 Shell, I get wallpaper and that's it. No panels, no nothing.

I can click alt-F4 to log out, and that's about it.

GNOME fallback mode (i.e. 2D) still works fine, as does Xfce. I wasn't locked out of GNOME at all, just the 3D/Shell version.

This Debian Forums post helped, though I don't think it describes my exact problem. I did take its advice and reinstall gnome-session and gnome-panel. It worked for awhile, then stopped working. I did it again, and GNOME 3 is working again. I'll update this post when I'm sure of the long-term viability of this fix.

Here is the command I used in the console:

$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome-session gnome-panel

For now this fix is working. I haven't seen anything on the Debian mailing lists or forums that describes my exact problem, so this could just be something that affects me alone

I decided to go in a different direction in my previously intended Linux testing regimen and sample the Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix.

I've been fairly happy with GNOME 3.4.2 in Debian Wheezy but eager to see what GNOME 3.6 has to offer.

I could've gone Fedora, but I'm looking for a smoother transition from Debian Wheezy to whatever I run next.

The new Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix seems perfect in that regard. I keep the Debian base and might even be able to install Ubuntu over Debian and keep the same partition layout.

In my Debian Wheezy GNOME 3.4 desktop, I used the Transmission bittorrent client to download the 64-bit ISO. After a few unsuccessful attempts to create a bootable USB flash drive with the image using dd and cat, I surmised that this wasn't a hybrid ISO image. So I installed unetbootin and used it to create a bootable USB drive with the Ubuntu GNOME remix. I was also able to create persistent storage on the flash drive.

Even though this is the live environment and not a proper installation. There are a few things I can say based on my brief experience with Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix:

• The "jumping tap-to-click touchpad" problem that I have in Debian Wheezy with Xfce but NOT in Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 is present in Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix.

That is a problem. And a reason to stick with Debian (or try Fedora). I haven't been able to figure out why Debian with GNOME handles this so well but everything else I've tried does not. This is a quirk peculiar to my hardware, the Lenovo G555 laptop and can be solved by turning off tap-to-click. I'd like to solve it while keeping tap-to-click, but a thorough analysis of the synclient output in Debian's GNOME 3 offers no clues.

• GNOME 3 Shell seems faster in Ubuntu 12.10's 3.6.0 than it does in Debian Wheezy's 3.4.2.

Everything is just a little bit more responsive. Hitting the "super" key and typing in the first letters of an application are a bit smoother on the screen in Ubuntu 12.10 vs. Debian Wheezy. I don't think it's all that much faster, but it looks better. And it's a little faster. Update: I'm not sure if this is responsible for the "speed-up" in GNOME 3.6, but the GNOME Shell extension called Impatience makes things much faster and smoother on my Debian Wheezy GNOME 3 desktop. It's a great extension and works well in Wheezy's version of GNOME 3.

• Though everything in the Ubuntu 12.10 GNOME Remix is pretty much GNOME 3.6, the Nautilus file manager remains at version 3.4.2, just like in the stock Unity edition of Ubuntu.

• A big difference in GNOME 3.6 vs. 3.4 is the presence of an application-grid icon in the application panel on the left side of the screen.

It simplifies the look of the Activities screen that appears when you click the "super" key or mouse into the upper-left corner. This is one of the "big" changes in GNOME 3.6. I like it, but it's more evolutionary than revolutionary.

I periodically check up on my Compaq Armada 7770dmt, the 1999 machine running a Pentium II MMX processor at 233 MHz with 144 MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive.

While I'm still partial to Puppy 2.13 -- a very, very, very old release, I wanted to see how this old Compaq performed on a new Puppy. I do have a 20 GB laptop drive floating around, and if I find it, I could either use it entirely for storage with Puppy, or install something like Debian without the constraints of a mere 3 GB of hard drive space.

Today I did an update/upgrade of the Debian Squeeze installation on the Compaq. Then I burned a Wary Puppy 5.3 CD on another machine and proceeded to try it out on the 233 MHz laptop.

In the unlikely event that you have this exact same ancient laptop and want to run a modern Puppy live system, know that when configuring video, Xorg doesn't work. Choose Xvesa instead.

Anyhow, I don't know if it was the nature of modern Linux, a growing "heaviness" for the Seamonkey web browser, or something else. But Wary Puppy 5.3 was slower than Debian Squeeze with Xfce. Using the web browser at all made the rest of the 144 MB system pretty much unusable.

About a half-hour into my Wary Puppy session, no apps at all would start. I could've rebooted and tried again, but I didn't. I know that using a Mozilla-made browser on hardware this old is painful.

In Debian I use Chromium, which is a quite a bit lighter than Firefox/Seamonkey, and that makes this old machine much more pleasant to use.

And Xfce is a very usable desktop on hardware this ancient. It's all about which applications you use. If you avoid heavy browsers like Firefox/Iceweasel, stick to text editors like Mousepad and Geany (OpenOffice/LibreOffice is not something I'd recommend at all) and keep things simple, even a 13-year-old computer can have some utility. This is a great machine for writing (as I'm doing now with Mousepad).

You can't go wrong with Xfce staples like the Thunar file manager, Mousepad text editor, Ristretto image viewer and Xfce Terminal. To that I add selected extras like the gFTP client, mtPaint image editor (thanks to Puppy for introducing me to it), Geany IDE/editor (thanks again to Puppy) and Ted word processor (introduced to me in Damn Small Linux and no longer in Debian but available as a .deb from the developer).

There's a lot you can't do with a 13-year-old computer, but there's a lot you can do, too.

I don't download nearly as many Linux and BSD ISO images as I used to. Recently I purged my "collection" of ISOs on CD and DVD. I probably dumped 200 discs going all the way back to when I started with free operating systems in 2007.

And these days I don't distro-hop. I pretty much just run Debian, either Stable or Testing, and currently the latter.

I keep my hand in. My recent tests have included a trio of Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones: Scientific Linux, CentOS and CentOS spin Stella.

Two distributions I keep an eye on are Crunchbang and Bodhi. I recently grabbed torrents of both systems -- in Crunchbang's case the Testing image (based on Debian Testing, currently Wheezy) and Bodhi 2.1.0, based on Ubuntu 12.04.

Chances of me installing one of these distributions on my main laptop aren't great but aren't nil either.

What I'd like to do is get a few USB flash drives and install to those instead of burning optical discs. It is the 2010s after all. Once I get some time in the live environments, I very well might go a different direction and install something new.

Other systems that interest me include Fedora (GNOME, Xfce and LXDE) and Ubuntu (the stock Unity, plus GNOME, Xfce and LXDE). I do have a Lubuntu (Ubuntu with LXDE) installation running on another laptop, and it's running quite well.

Key is how I feel about GNOME 3 vs. other desktop environments. If I weren't having touchpad tap-to-click issues in Debian Wheezy with Xfce that disappear in GNOME 3 that I can't seem to clear up in Xfce, I'd be a happy Wheezy Xfce user. I have everything else in Xfce pretty much the way I want it. Except for this touchpad issue. Most of it is lousy hardware. Lenovo really f'd up on this one, I can tell you that.

But if GNOME 3 can take care of it, certainly Xfce can, too. Or another distribution entirely.

So I will be looking around, but there's always GNOME 3. Or turning off tap-to-click.

At this point, taming the touchpad in Debian Wheezy with Xfce is more about not letting the software and hardware get the best of me than anything else. It's also "insurance" against future Linux systems not configuring this touchpad as well as Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3.

Note: The touchpad is an absolute nightmare in Windows 7. About the only thing you can do is turn it completely off. Tap-to-click is the default, and it's a text-deleting nightmare. So in this case Linux is winning big time. But it can always do better. If only Lenovo and Alps didn't release such crappy hardware.

Due to my slower home connection, I didn't update my Debian Wheezy laptop over the weekend, and today I have 103 packages about to flow onto this system.

Aside from a new kernel, new Chromium web browser, new LibreOffice and new Java/OpenJDK/IcedTea, there are plenty of other packages coming along for the ride from GNOME, new ffmpeg and libav, cups and more.

Why so many packages at once? Could it mean the release of Wheezy as Debian's Stable distribution is closer than not? I have no answers yet.

All I do know is if you're running Debian Wheezy right now, be prepared for a whole lot of updates.

steven@lenovo:~$ sudo aptitude upgrade
Resolving dependencies...                
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  linux-headers-3.2.0-4-amd64{a} linux-headers-3.2.0-4-common{a} 
  linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64{a} 
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  linux-headers-3.2.0-3-amd64{u} linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common{u} 
The following packages will be upgraded:
  chromium chromium-browser-inspector chromium-inspector cups cups-bsd 
  cups-client cups-common cups-ppdc evolution-data-server 
  evolution-data-server-common ffmpeg fonts-opensymbol gdm3 
  gir1.2-panelapplet-4.0 gnome-terminal gnome-terminal-data 
  google-talkplugin icedtea-6-jre-cacao icedtea-6-jre-jamvm kdelibs-bin 
  kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins kdoctools libav-tools libavcodec53 
  libavdevice-extra-53 libavdevice53 libavfilter-extra-2 libavfilter2 
  libavformat-extra-53 libavformat53 libavutil51 libcamel-1.2-33 libcups2 
  libcupscgi1 libcupsdriver1 libcupsimage2 libcupsmime1 libcupsppdc1 
  libebackend-1.2-2 libebook-1.2-13 libecal-1.2-11 libedata-book-1.2-13 
  libedata-cal-1.2-15 libedataserver-1.2-16 libedataserverui-3.0-1 
  libglib2.0-data libgtkhtml-4.0-0 libgtkhtml-4.0-common 
  libgtkhtml-editor-4.0-0 libkcmutils4 libkde3support4 libkdeclarative5 
  libkdecore5 libkdesu5 libkdeui5 libkdewebkit5 libkdnssd4 libkemoticons4 
  libkfile4 libkhtml5 libkidletime4 libkio5 libkjsapi4 libkjsembed4 
  libkmediaplayer4 libknewstuff2-4 libknewstuff3-4 libknotifyconfig4 
  libkntlm4 libkparts4 libkprintutils4 libkpty4 libkrosscore4 libkrossui4 
  libktexteditor4 libkutils4 libmozjs185-1.0 libnepomuk4 libnepomukquery4a 
  libnepomukutils4 libpanel-applet-4-0 libplasma3 libpostproc52 
  libraptor2-0 libreoffice-common libreoffice-filter-mobiledev 
  libreoffice-help-en-us libreoffice-java-common libreoffice-pdfimport 
  libreoffice-report-builder-bin libreoffice-style-galaxy 
  libreoffice-style-tango libsolid4 libswscale2 libthreadweaver4 
  libxenstore3.0 linux-headers-amd64 linux-image-amd64 linux-libc-dev 
  openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib 
103 packages upgraded, 3 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 177 MB of archives. After unpacking 112 MB will be used.
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