On Mon 14 Sep 2020 at 08:12:50 -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Sat, Sep 12, 2020 at 07:19:50PM +0100, mick crane wrote: > > Is the "Debian desktop environment" Gnome plus other things ? In which case > > the way it is makes sense. > > My understanding, flawed as it may be, is that the installer doesn't > actually KNOW what the default will be, at the time it draws up the > menu. A user who selects "Debian desktop" gets whatever the default > happens to be for the particular installer image that they've booted > up. With the official netinst/DVD-1 images, that default happens to > be GNOME. But with some of the "Live" images, or the older CD-sized > images (no longer supported), the default could be something else.
The Debian desktop environment installs task-desktop. This package recommends desktop task packages. task-gnome-desktop is the first one listed, so it will be the one installed. In that sense, the installer does know what the default is. > I don't have any strong opinions about this, but I wouldn't complain if > "Debian desktop environment" (the mystery choice) would just go away. > Let users select GNOME or KDE or whatever they actually want. Suppose a user installs with base-installer/install-recommends set to false. With the Debian desktop environment being the only option ticked, a user would not install task-gnome-desktop but would get xorg and enough software to use X. The suggested scheme would not cater for this. -- Brian.