When I switched to Linux full time back in 2004 for desktop use, I chose my then favourite distro, Debian. Soon after this the first vesion of Ubuntu was released. At the time Ubuntu combined a much needed focus on getting things to work with the wonders of Debians apt package manager. I started gravitating towards using it more and more.
In the years following I have dabbled in other distros, a particular favourite being Arch Linux. But I have always returned to Ubuntu after a while, because there always seems to exist a certain friction that simply isn't there in Ubuntu. Even though tinkering with your OS is fun, sometimes you just need to get work done as well.
This brings me to the desktop environments. A few year back, Ubuntu started using their own DE called Unity. They where perhaps off to a bit of a rocky start, but got their act together quite quickly, and Unity turned out pretty well. At the time it was quite revolutionary and different, but osmosis and getting used to it has gotten me to consider it pretty vanilla. One thing I myself have seen as a bad thing with Unity is the lack of customisability, there are various small tweaks for it, but mostly options have been removed with a heavy hand.
I have tried other DE:s in Ubuntu, but the problem is that most of them are second class citizens. Unity is Ubuntus baby, and all others will suffer for it. The one that suffers the most is probably Gnome, since Unity is running on a heavily patched version of Gnome 3.
Now, I used to love Gnome 2. The standard old fashioned Windows/Mac os9 like desktop of the Linuxes of yesteryear, but some parts of it was driving me absolutely bonkers, like the panel. So I was quite exited when Gnome3 and Gnome Shell was released.
For those who have never tried Gnome Shell, I have to tell you that this desktop is like nothing you have ever seen before. When they designed it, they threw out the book on how to build a desktop environment. Pretty much every single aspect was re-though, and the ones they didn't think of re-thinking in the first version, they have made sure to re-think in later versions.
Because of this, the first version of Gnome Shell was pretty horrible. The applications where not making use of the new features, and everything was hard to do. Plus you had to retrain yourself in all old habits. After a few iterations, however, it became a quite interesting and pleasant environment to use. But here the Ubuntu focus on Unity got a bit in the way. There where third party repos that fixed most of the problems, but the whole thing was littered with strangeness from Ubuntus modifications.
Fast forward to a few months ago. Now, before I continue I feel that I must give a small disclaimer. I'm going to write some things that might put Ubuntu in somewhat of a negative light. This is based entirely on my own opinions, and I would still wholeheartedly recommend Ubuntu as the distro of choice for someone that wants to try Linux, but doesn't want to tinker with everything.
The Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Long Term Support) was a fairly solid release all in all. However, I had started getting a lot of annoying problems with my machines. Some of these problems had to do with the graphics drivers. I have a AMD GPU in my desktop, and had one in my old laptop as well. I liked to use the open source drivers, because I really didn't need the raw speed out of the GPU, and they tended to work a lot better than the proprietary ones. But at some point the open source drivers in Ubuntu became almost useless. The AMD drivers started bugging a lot if they ever worked, and the nvidia open source drivers for my new laptop where so painfully slow that you would not even wish using them on your worst enemy. In general I started experiencing a lot of slowness on my systems. This coupled with the fact that Unity felt more and more restricted all the time, got me thinking that I should maybe see what Debian had been up to in the last 10 years.
My laptop had been acting up a lot lately, so I decided to start with that. I know that Debian Stable is usually very, very stable, as in, it uses very onld versions of the software. But I decided to try that one nevertheless. The first thing I noticed, was that when the Debian people kept stating that their installer is now much easier to use, they where talking about an improvement from something pretty damn hard to something only quite difficult. Don't get me wrong, Debian is not hard to install for someone who knows how a computer works, and it's child's play compared to Arch Linux. But a normal user would not be able to install it, where Ubuntu is quite a bit easier than Windows to install.
I had to copy some firmware files to the USB drive in order to get the WiFi working, but otherwise there wasn't any problems.
Once I got it up and running, I was actually quite impressed. Debian comes with a standard Gnome Shell DE, and it looks pretty damned good. I quickly noticed that the stable version had so old versions of everything that I had a lot of trouble running much of the third party software I had gotten used to. I had to do folders with different versions of different libraries for different software. I quickly figured out that that whole thing was pretty stupid, and the version I really wanted was "testing". Basically the work in progress of the upcoming release of "stable". Once I had upgraded to that, I had the system that I wanted. Debian comes with no non-free software by default, so the expectation is to run open source drivers for everything. This suited me fine, since it was pretty much what I wanted. Even the nvidia open source driver where working really well.
So down to the nuts and bolts a bit. Ubuntu is based on Debian, but the two distros have quite a different philosophy. Debian is all about running on many platforms, and not having parts that would hider that (non open source). It's also about having the choice to do anything you please on the system. No part is really more important than another. Ubuntu on the other hand is about having a system that works without any extra configuration or tweaking. A bit like OsX, it makes all the choices for you. As long as you are happy with them everything is fine.
I was afraid that there would be a lot of things that wouldn't work in Debian, that worked in Ubuntu. This had always been my experience when using a non-Ubuntu distro. But it seems that my fears have been largely unfounded. Because Ubuntu is based on Debian, most of the things you can install on Ubuntu, you can also install on Debian. And Debian actually tend to include a lot of stuff that Ubuntu have dropped from their repos.
Back to the desktop environment for a bit. As I stated Gnome Shell is the default environment in Debian. It's been a few years since I used it last. I must say that there are quite a bit of things that I really like about it. Gnome Shell is however pretty much about extensions. The bare bones environment is very minimalistic. I suspect it's not really meant to be used like that, but since they didn't want to make too many assumptions about how people would like to use it, they left the rest up to the user to customize.
Now there are a few things in Gnome that is driving me crazy. Actually two things in particular, one not so bad, and one infuriating. The not so bad one is that there used to be a feature in the file manager where you could press f3 to split the window into two. This was extremely useful when you wanted to copy things from one location to another. That one I get why they removed. It was useful, but felt a bit like a hack and didn't really fit into the design. Besides you could just open two windows and drag one to the left edge, and the other to the right. You get pretty much the same result, with only slightly more work.
The one that is really driving me insane is that they removed to option of transparent background on the terminal window. I'm not even sure why this is such a big deal for me, but it is. I feel so totally crippled when the terminal windows are covering up everything beneath them. I really don't know what to do about this one. I might have to switch to something completely different for the terminal.
Besides that, I really like where they are going with Gnome Shell. And once you get the right extensions installed, it starts getting really easy to use, and you feel productive using it. It is as I stated earlier really different from most other desktops, but there has gone a lot of thought into it, and I kinda admire the way they keep doing their own thing, even when it infuriates some people. Mostly it turns out well in the end.
This post turned out a lot longer that I had planned, and a lot more of a rant. But to conclude, I think that I will stick with Debian, and Gnome shell for a while. It feels like a very good fit for me. I will probably check back in a while with my longer term opinions about the whole thing.