Use the Elementary OS desktop environment on Debian 8

If ever came to use Elementary OS or they got to know a little about him through videos or images, they will know that this Ubuntu-based Linux distribution has its own desktop environment which is not only available for your system, but also for others.

Well, the environment we are talking about is Pantheon. This environment began as an alternative interface that people could install in Ubuntu, over time and due to the great acceptance that this environment had, the founder of Elementary OS Daniel Fore chose to create something of their own and that is how Pantheon was born and Elementary OS.

The Pantheon desktop environment has some similarities to GNOME Shell and MacOS in particular Pantheon is written from scratch using Vala and the GTK3 toolkit.

The Pantheon desk it is very simple and easy to learn It basically consisted of two elements, the panel and the dock.

By default, you cannot put icons on the desktop, the right-click on the desktop is disabled, so to change the wallpaper or access other actions you will need to access the system settings.

En the top of the screen is the "Applications" menu, in the center are the time and date, and to the right are the indicators. Indicators inform you about the current status of your sessions, such as network connections, battery power, email and chat accounts, and system notifications.

On the left side of the panel is the item "Applications" By clicking on "Applications" a launcher will appear with all the installed applications, these can be distributed in several pages of applications depending on the number of them you have installed, to navigate in them you can do it using the locators at the bottom or scrolling.

They can also use the view selector at the top to switch between a grid view and a category view.

As well can search apps or system settings by name or keyword and perform actions associated with them, such as terminal commands, compose new messages from the mail application, shutdown and restart.

How to install Pantheon on Debian 8 Jessie?

To install this desktop environment on our system, we have the facility that there is a dedicated repository for this, we just have to add it to our list.

For this we just have to open a terminal and execute the following command:

echo "deb http://dl.bintray.com/mithrandirn/pantheon-debian/ jessie main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pantheon-debian.list

Done this, now we must add the keys to the system with the following system:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys CBF6E0B8483170E9

We can now update our list of packages, we do it with this command:

sudo apt-get update

Finally, since the system detected the changes that a new repository was added, we can now install Pantheon on our system with the following command:

sudo apt-get install pantheon desktop-base

The download and installation time will depend on your internet connection, so it may take a while.

Once the installation is done correctly, we can proceed to close our user session in order to start our session, but now with the desktop environment installed, even though the recommended option is to restart the computer.

How to uninstall Phanteon from the system?

If for any reason you want to uninstall this desktop environment from your system, you must take into account that you must have at least one other environment installed on your system because otherwise you will lose the graphical environment and you will have to use your computer in a terminal.

To uninstall the environment, we must open a terminal and execute the following commands:

sudo apt-get remove pantheon desktop-base

sudo apt-get autoremove

Finally, it only remains to start enjoying your new desktop environment on your system, you will also be able to know the other tools that make up this great environment.