I don't use it, and ditched gnome when version 3 came along.

As to removing it from Devuan.  There might be a case for dropping it
from task-select, but I think that's premature if it's not yet broken. 
But perhaps it could come with a warning or dropped into a subset of 
"bloated and possibly broken desktop environments" in order to make it
clear that it's not recommended.

As an aside here's my view on desktops at the moment:

Gnome 2.4 was already badly bloated and slow but bearable.

Gnome 3 with it's gnome-shell was nothing more then an attempt to foist
MS Windows 8 nonsense on the linux desktop.

So I switched to and continue to use the much lighter XFCE and have
found it ok.  Not perfect but a good balance of fairly lightweight and
sensible window management and extra's like panels notifiers etc.  It is
fairly functional and not that hard for newbies to get used to - even
when coming from windows for the first time.  I help a lot of people off
the Microsoft dependency and they all invariably start with XFCE as
their first step.

Mate seemed to continue the bloated gnome 2.4 experience, and Cinammon
just being a reskinned gnome-shell whilst a big improvement on Gnome3 UI
wise, was just as sluggish IMHO.


On 23/06/25 20:32, Erik Christiansen via Dng wrote:
> On 22.06.25 18:59, Steve Litt wrote:
> > But maybe, more to the point, we can have an unofficial poll to see
> > how many Devuan users regularly use Gnome as a desktop environment.
>
> Not here, on any machine.
>
> TBT, I just use the install default, currently xfce on beowulf. The
> laptop has an older lxde, and I can't tell the difference - they all
> seem identical to me. (I have 'em autostart 4 xterms, one with mutt, and
> roam the others, vimming 'n whatnot. They all run firefox, xpdf, and
> kicad just the same, so how would you know?)
>
> The only observed nicety is Applications->office->dictionary on xfce.
> Ah, it's xfce4-dict. Maybe I could just  install it on lxde if that's
> what turns
> up next install.
>
> Erik
>
>
>
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