On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 5:08 PM, Ted Harding Ted.Harding@wlandres.net wrote:
On 04-Nov-2012 15:54:06 nev young wrote:
On 03/11/12 21:18, Bev Nicolson wrote:
About this time last year, nev was aghast at Unity being foisted on him because of his upgrade to 11.10.
Nev is still aghast at this. I'm still running 10.04 as a result. I tried 11.10 and 12.04 (the replacement LTS version) for several months but they ware so unstable as to be unusable (just my experience YMMV) I tried with both the unity desktop and with (the much crippled) gnome.
Luckily constant up-time is less of a problem now I have the web server running on a Raspberry Pi. So I can play with other distros but to be honest, anything that is aimed at the tablet market just isn't going to make me happy.
Nev (still lurking)
Classic Gnome is very well adapted to my working habits (which can be complicated, but Gnome allows me to navigate through them with ease). I had a look at Unity, since that was to be the future, and was nauseated.
A solution I am trying at the moment (recent experimental installation) is Scientific Linux:
https://www.scientificlinux.org
This is based on RHEL/Fedora but is independently complied from source, and is devotedly maintained by the various labs (CERN, Fermilab, etc.) that set it up in the first place and are involved in maintaining it. Their philosophy seems to be "No bl***y nosense, thank you".
In particular, they have versions which stick to classic Gnome, and they seem determined to keep classic Gnome going. See e.g.:
https://www.scientificlinux.org/news/SL6.3-live
"Scientific Linux 6.3 LiveCD, LiveMiniCD and LiveDVD are officially released. They are available for 32-bit and 64-bit and come with following window manager
LiveMiniCD icewm LiveCD gnome LiveDVD gnome, kde, icewm"
The one thing I haven't fully sussed out yet is the full detail for installing extra packages (including those complied for Fedora outside of the SciLin groups -- e.g. the statistical software R). But the machine I have it on is running fine so far, and has the exact Gnome that I know and love.
This may tempt/be useful to some!
Best wishes to all, Ted.
Scientific linux that's an interesting choice.
I had a 'distro review' back in late 2009 when i was trying to decide which to stay with before unity came out. I looked at Mint, Centos... and scientific linux...... and loads of others. It's a worthwhile exercise every now and again.
rpm is ok until it comes to updates - just seems to take forever. Yet one should be aware that more distros are rpm based than deb forked. For package management apt-debian i think is still the best (as opposed to PCLos which is apt-rpm... think they are the only ones).
I found i liked xfce and Mint. Then after no updates for a while i wondered what was going on. Apparently the maintainer had domestic problems. Some of the smaller distros have few staff to support it - worth bearing in mind.
I've been using xubuntu and i have to say that it's what i'm happiest with - minimal but with some nice apps like the file renamer... basic but better than Pyrename and Krename. Ubuntu seems to have taken a 'nosedive' along with suse this last couple of years.
james