Debian 6.0 Was Just Released!

[devius]

What the hell happened to the debian website? It's so 1990-ish now. It used to look way better. I guess they are just adapting it to it's primary user base. On the plus side it is ultra fast now.

[Linas]

Great news! I hope we will see GTK3 migration speeding up now. There are already quite a few of GNOME 3 packages in experimental (like nautilus, gnome-session, etc.), but several major ones (like gnome-panel) are still missing. Tried playing around with them, but it seems that mixing GNOME 2 and 3 does not work very well.

[brent]

The SpaceFun theme is the default. Really Debian, why? This is horrible. It was pretty much the worst off all the choices. It boggles my mind that they would use something so amateurish by default without any second thought or user input.

That, plus the asinine "if you don't like it, don't use it!" attitude.

[DanL]

The theme is such a personal choice that it's impossible to please everyone unless you choose a bland theme (and then some people will still complain). That's probably why they don't put a lot of effort into theming.

[brent]

The default theme represents the distribution though - more so if it's also used on the website, like SpaceFun. And it's a crappy representation. Moreover, it's a bad idea to not even try just because something seems hard.

[marwi509]

The default theme represents the distribution though - more so if it's also used on the website, like SpaceFun. And it's a crappy representation. Moreover, it's a bad idea to not even try just because something seems hard.

I agree. I mean, the artwork for lenny was beautiful. And the change it for this.

[Linas]

Saying that it is "crappy" is not very explanatory, is it? It is playful, maybe a little childish, but it is consistent (grub, gdm3 themes, desktop wallpapers, etc.), and high quality artwork. I have no clue why it was actually chosen, but my guess would be "universal operating system" taken kind of literally.

If you do not like it, there is an easy fix:

sudo update-alternatives --config desktop-background
sudo update-alternatives --config desktop-grub
sudo update-alternatives --config desktop-splash

Check /usr/share/images/desktop-base/ for what these images actually look like.

Also, if you are running plymouth:

sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -l
sudo plymouth-set-default-theme $ONE_OF_LISTED_ABOVE
sudo update-initramfs -u -k all

And if you are using gdm3, you can set your favourite picture in /usr/share/gdm/greeter-config/10_desktop-base.

Lenny look is still available in the above choices. Enjoy you custom Debian look!

[sc4bbk]

on the other hand, does anyone know of a debian based distro with more up-to-date packages, other than ubuntu? preferably a rolling release?

Linux Mint Debian?

[schmidtbag]

sounds like you are asking for aptosid, formerly known as sidux.

i saw aptosid but it doesn't have any new packages. they're still all out of date. it added a few more packages that i didn't have before but its still "sid" based.

[BlueJayofEvil]

i saw aptosid but it doesn't have any new packages. they're still all out of date. it added a few more packages that i didn't have before but its still "sid" based.

What packages are you requiring, exactly? Have you looked at the Experimental branch?
If it's multimedia-related, check out the Debian Multimedia repos.