[Tails-testers] Poor desktop environment choice and heavy re…

I have been talking with two other users in the Tails IRC channel and we
all agree that the choice of GNOME 3 as the desktop environment for Tails
2.0 is a poor one given its intended purpose. GNOME 3 (particularly the
Compiz animations and other 'fancy' graphical features) is somewhat
sluggish and slow on our reasonably modern western computers. How are
people from developing countries with presumably worse computers supposed
to use Tails comfortably? Shouldn't Tails ideally be capable of being run
by a Chinese person using any random computer in a net cafe, somebody in
Africa using a very low-spec budget PC, and so on?

I do not know what beyond the DE is using execessive resources but greater
efforts should be taken to reduce Tails's resource requirements. At the
minimum offering a choice of DEs (such as an ultra-lightweight one like i3
or even MATE) as many live CDs do would be a better solution than the
default. I understand that the desire is to stay as close to upstream as
possible but Debian and Tails have different goals and thus should meet
different requirements. The boot times are also much longer. Isn't systemd
supposed to speed them up?

I hope you will give thought to at least offering a choice of a less
resource intensive DE in the future of the 2.x series or at least
disabling the animations.