The GNOME 2.30 environment in Debian Squeeze – surprisingly productive

It’s been this way ever since I began using Debian in the Etch days (circa 2007) — GNOME is generally pretty fast in a distro like Debian, and you can get a lot done with the tools provided by the desktop environment.

In the case of Debian Squeeze I’m talking about GNOME 2.30. Now that we’re in the GNOME 3 era — and very early on — I can only hope that the dust will settle and GNOME will be just as functional, if not more so, in the year ahead.

Not that I’ve tried GNOME Shell (or GNOME 3). The last time I tried a live distro that offered the new shell, for one reason or other it didn’t work, and I was in the “classic” GNOME environment.

Mind you, on this same hardware I was able to run Unity in Ubuntu 11.04. Not that I’m going to throw over GNOME 2.30 (or Degbian Squeeze) for Unity and Ubuntu, because I am not an early adopter.

I’d prefer that all the enthusiasts out there (that’s a nice way of saying fanboys) try out these new desktop environments, file tons of bug reports and hopefully yield something useful many months from now.

Not that it’s GNOME or nothing (even though I am one of the most enthusiastic users of NetworkManager you’ll ever find). I’ve spent considerable time running Xfce and could return to it in an instant. I just installed Fvwm2 (a holdover from my OpenBSD desktop days) on my Debian system, and the only reason I don’t use it more is that I’m using Dropbox, and while it’s certainly possible to use that service without GNOME, it’s by no means easy or instant.

And why fix what ain’t broke?

So for the foreseeable future, I’ll be using Nautilus to manage my files, NetworkManager to switch between wired Ethernet, WiFi and 3G broadband connections, Gedit when I don’t need to make changes across a dozen files at once (and Geany when I do), Rhythmbox and Totem for multimedia those few times I need them, the GNOME terminal (where the default type size/style in Debian looks so great), Brasero, gThumb (my No. 1 Linux app) and all those little utilities to configure this and that.

GNOME is good. Hopefully it’ll stay that way.

2 thoughts on “The GNOME 2.30 environment in Debian Squeeze – surprisingly productive

  1. I recently also discovered how amazing can be Squeeze with KDE. As you said, working much better than other distros with KDE.

  2. I agree. KDE in Debian is faster than just about anywhere.

    Slackware is another good choice for KDE, which is the “native” environment for the distro. It’s super fast, and is “stock” KDE.

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