The Debian Live GNOME ISO includes many more apps than are included in
the official Debian installer when you choose GNOME. These additional
apps show in the Activities Overview and create a much more cluttered
layout. This has led some people to avoid Debian GNOME because it
feels "bloated" to them, not realizing that the Live ISO is very
different than the non-Live version.
Because all these extra components are Recommends, we can exclude them
from the Live GNOME ISO, as was previously done in
https://bugs.debian.org/1084814 . I am submitting a merge request to
do this.
Because of this issue's high impact for Debian GNOME, I want to do a
Stable Update with this change to fix future Debian 13 point releases.
Notes for select removals
-------------------------
- debian-reference-common. This avoids a Debian Reference .desktop
which opens the browser with links to local copies of Debian Reference
but only in Italian and Spanish.
- Debian's ibus-anthy includes an autostart .desktop which sets the
default input method to Japanese (Anthy). As long as this package does
that, it is inappropriate for inclusion in Debian Live GNOME. Maybe
that feature should be split to a separate binary package so it can be
excluded from Debian GNOME LIve without losing the Anthy input method.
- fcitx5 adds 3 launchers to the default top level Activities
Overview. Many years ago, GNOME decided to integrate only ibus for
input methods. fcitx5 also pulls in Qt which is otherwise unnecessary
for Debian GNOME.
Other Info
----------
1. All of the extra language support packages are installed as part of
the Live install for everyone, even though most people won't need all
of them. That is a separate issue since that mostly takes up disk
space without adding visual clutter once this issue is fixed.
2. This issue affects other desktops but those will need to be handled
separately by analyzing differences between the defaul tinstall and
the live install. The Debian GNOME team particularly wants to have the
Activities Overview show only a single page of default apps on a full
HD (1920x1080) screen. Other desktop maintainers may have different
levels of comfort with additional preinstalled apps.
On behalf of the Debian GNOME team,
Jeremy Bícha