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. 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. If we're going to complain about the installer, the very top of my list would be "put the default sources.list lines in place, commented out, even when there's no Internet connection during the install". Users who come into IRC without a working sources.list file because they installed with the official image on a machine with proprietary wifi always have to be hand-held through getting the correct lines into sources.list so that apt(-get) will work.
