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Without addressing all your points, I can't help but notice: A: You have quite an old computer? 4:3 resolutions indicate you're using a CRT (nothing wrong with that) and the graphics card you're using is a Nvidia Riva TNT2, which could be up to 15 years old. It's perhaps not surprising that you are experiencing problems running a full modern distro on hardware of that vintage. Dare I ask what CPU/RAM you have? B: You're quite right about fault attribution after all: Debian can't be held fully responsible for the crazy upstream bugginess of Gnome3, but then again, they do ship it by default... It's most definitely not *your* fault, that's for sure. I have a couple of suggestions for you anyway though. With a gfx card that old, it's unlikely that you're running decent drivers unless you've fought your way through the Nvidia legacy install nightmare: you're probably running on the open source Nouveau driver instead (which is philosophically admirable, but technically it's borderline useless). Rendering issues tend to massively impact modern compositing desktop managers which is quite probably why your Systems Settings isn't working properly. Can you try running: glxinfo | grep "direct rendering" If it complains about program not found, you will need to "sudo apt-get install mesa-utils" to install glxinfo. If the answer is "No", which it probably will be, Gnome3 was doomed from the start on your hardware - you need to install a proper driver and get direct rendering working properly to get any semblance of a modern desktop environment functional. That of course doesn't preclude you from using OpenBox, LDXE, XFCE or whatever (although XFCE also benefits from hardware compositing) lightweight tool you prefer. Have you tried or thought about the Mint/Debian edition distro - it's Debian based rather than Ubuntu (you seem to be used to Debian, good call) but very friendly and good at sorting out the sort of stuff that can be a headache to non-gurus on stock Debian - automatic driver installs, etc. If you don't fancy that at all, you strike me perhaps as a bit of an old school user who is still missing Gnome 2 and not particularly keen on either upgrading your perfectly functional hardware or putting up with modern DE craziness: Mint offer Debian compatible repos for both of their alternative desktop environments, Mate and Cinnamon. Mate particularly might interest you as it's effectively a resurrection of the old Gnome 2 desktop. All the information you could want for this is at: http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/ You also mentioned "apt-downgrade": I must caution you, *NEVER* even attempt this. Whilst it is moderately trivial to back out individual bad packages on a case by case basis, particularly on Sid or Jesse with any experimental or backport repos added, I can assure you with 100% confidence if you ever try to fully downgrade from one Debian flavour to another (i.e., Wheezy > Squeeze) you will utterly destroy your OS. Your data should survive, but you'll be using a rescue disk to access it. Seriously. And don't worry about asking for answers: what else am I supposed to at this time of night when the missus is away on a night shift and I'm waiting for things to compile? Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq