Linux debian gui install

Desktop components

Other desktop environments available in Debian include Cinnamon, LXQt, Budgie, Enlightenment, FVWM-Crystal, GNUstep/Window Maker, Sugar and possibly others.

Other desktop environments not available in Debian include Unity (1 2), Pantheon, ROX, Equinox/EDE, Étoilé, CDE, Artemis, Durden, Trident, Lumina and others.

Window Manager

As its name says, Window Managers control the layout, appearance and ways to interact with your environment windows. While some Window Managers might be part of your Desktop Environment, some (such as tiled window managers) also do work as standalone, and were eventually designed for that purpose.

Search Window Managers with Debtags: x11::window-manager.

Tiling Window Managers

Tiling Window Managers provide a way to control windows behavior by making them tiled, easily occupying the whole screen.

Display Managers

In the X Window System, an X display manager is a graphical login manager which starts a session on an X server from the same or another computer. A display manager presents the user with a login screen. A session starts when a user successfully enters a valid combination of username and password.

Display server

Most Desktop Environment currently rely on Xorg (X Window System), and will eventually support Wayland in the future.

How it works?

Installation of a Desktop Environment

During the installation of Debian the installer offers the choice of which Desktop Environment to install. Should you prefer to install one after booting into the new OS, you can decline all the offerings by unticking Debian desktop environment.

A user on Debian 10 (buster) or Debian 11 (bullseye) would be presented with the menu:

[*] Debian desktop environment [ ] GNOME [ ] Xfce [ ] KDE Plasma [ ] Cinnamon [ ] MATE [ ] LXDE [ ] LXQt

• Accepting this selection sees the GNOME desktop environment installed.
• Without deselecting the desktop environment, another entry, GNOME included, may be selected. This will install that selection.
• Unticking Debian desktop environment and selecting any other choice leads to that choice being installed.

For an explanation of this behaviour we have to look at part of the Recommends: line in apt show task-desktop.

Recommends: task-gnome-desktop | task-xfce-desktop | task-kde-desktop | task-lxde-desktop | task-cinnamon-desktop | task-mate-desktop | task-lxqt-desktop

• The Debian desktop environment installs task-desktop and requires one of the packages listed above. If none of them are on the system, the first in the list, task-gnome-desktop, will be installed to fulfill the dependency. This is the situation when a user accepts only the Debian desktop environment.
• Looking at apt show task-mate-desktop we see that it depends on task-desktop and mate-desktop-environment. Ticking MATE, with or without the Debian desktop environment ticked, would satisfy task-desktop’s Recommends: line and install MATE instead of the Gnome default.

Afterward, installing another Desktop Environment is as simple as installing a single package. For some Desktop Environments, you have choice between several meta-packages depending on if you wish to install a minimal set or most of the software coming with the environment. Please refer to the page specific to the Desktop Environment you wish to install for a description of these meta-packages.

Installing a new Desktop Environment will make it available for your system, but you still need to set up your user Session (see below) in order to run it.

Sessions

Sessions are usually managed by the Display Manager, which itself relies on Xsession.

Most Display Managers will allow you to select which Desktop Environment/Window Manager you wish to run for next session, and eventually make it default.

If you don’t want to run a Display Manager to manage your sessions, you might consider using nodm — you may be comfortable merely using a screen locker (eg. XScreensaver, slock) to lock your sessions manually instead of expecting it to insist on username plus password to get in. This is likely inappropriate for servers, but may well be acceptable for a user’s home system, assuming no familial trust issues.

If you have no Display Manager installed at all, you can still start the X Environment from console with the startx command, which is a call to xinit.

Theming and customization

Desktop environments often have customized themes that allow you to change the look and feel of your desktop. The easiest way to customize your desktop environment is to install theme packages from your system’s Package Manager.

Further customization is possible by editing settings of Graphical Toolkits, such as GTK2, GTK3, or directly change the application settings.

Some terminals like xterm and urxvt make use of Xresources to control their appearance and functionalities.

Search X11 Themes with Debtags: x11::theme.

Fonts

Learn about getting Fonts, fonts rendering and other issues.

Common problems

Heterogeneous environments

While the purpose of a desktop is to provide a coherent suite of applications, you are likely to mix applications coming from several desktops which are using various graphical toolkits, with the inconvenience that they will not be well integrated.

Getting a uniform look and feel between your applications might be challenging, and relies on workarounds such as using themes specifically designed to look similar between several environments and applications.

Some features such as the desktop menus can be shared, in particular for environments following FreeDesktop (XDG) guidelines.

Default applications

Having several applications with the same purpose will lead to competition for which software is meant to open when handling your files. Several mechanisms do exist to control these default applications and settings.

Resources

End-user

Cross-theming

• qt5-gtk-platformtheme : may help to have similar look with QT5 applications within GTK environments
• Base16 : guidelines to make similar-looking themes for various applications.

Contributing

See also

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Linux debian gui install

The free graphical desktop field is dominated by two large software collections: GNOME and Plasma by KDE. Both of them are very popular.

This diversity is rooted in history. Plasma (initially only KDE, which is now the name of the community) was the first graphical desktop project, but it chose the Qt graphical toolkit and that choice wasn’t acceptable for a large number of developers. Qt was not free software at the time, and GNOME was started based on the GTK+ toolkit. Qt has since become free software, but the projects still evolved in parallel.

The GNOME and KDE communities still work together: under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella, the projects collaborated in defining standards for interoperability across applications.

Выбор «лучшего» графического рабочего стола является деликатной темой, от которой мы предпочитаем держаться подальше. Мы просто опишем их возможности и дадим несколько советов для дальнейших размышлений. Лучшим выбором будет тот, который вы сделаете после некоторых экспериментов.

13.3.1. GNOME

Debian Bullseye includes GNOME version 3.38, which can be installed by a simple apt install gnome (it can also be installed by selecting the “Debian desktop environment” task — task-desktop and task-gnome-desktop ).

GNOME is noteworthy for its efforts in usability and accessibility. Design professionals have been involved in writing its standards and recommendations, which has helped developers to create satisfying graphical user interfaces. The project also gets encouragement from the big players of computing, such as Intel, IBM, Oracle, Novell, and of course, various Linux distributions. Finally, many programming languages can be used in developing applications interfacing to GNOME.

Рисунок 13.1. Рабочий стол GNOME

For administrators, GNOME seems to be better prepared for massive deployments. Application configuration is handled through the GSettings interface and stores its data in the DConf database. The configuration settings can thus be queried and edited with the gsettings , and dconf command-line tools, or by the dconf-editor graphical user interfaces. The administrator can therefore change users’ configuration with a simple script. The GNOME website provides information to guide administrators who manage GNOME workstations:

13.3.2. KDE and Plasma

Debian Bullseye includes version 5.20 of KDE Plasma, which can be installed with apt install kde-standard ( task-kde-desktop ).

Plasma has had a rapid evolution based on a very hands-on approach. Its authors quickly got very good results, which allowed them to grow a large user-base. These factors contributed to the overall project quality. Plasma is a mature desktop environment with a wide range of applications.

Рисунок 13.2. The Plasma desktop

Since the Qt 4.0 release, the last remaining license problem with KDE software has been solved. This version was released under the GPL both for Linux and Windows (the Windows version was previously released under a non-free license). KDE applications are primarily developed using the C++ language.

13.3.3. Xfce и другие

Xfce is a simple and lightweight graphical desktop, which is a perfect match for computers with limited resources. It can be installed with apt install xfce4 ( task-xfce-desktop ). Like GNOME, Xfce is based on the GTK+ toolkit, and several components are common across both desktops.

Unlike GNOME and Plasma, Xfce does not aim to become a vast project. Beyond the basic components of a modern desktop (file manager, window manager, session manager, a panel for application launchers and so on), it only provides a few specific applications: a terminal, a calendar ( orage ), an image viewer, a CD/DVD burning tool, a media player ( parole ), sound volume control and a text editor ( mousepad ).

Рисунок 13.3. Рабочий стол Xfce

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