For me I think Ubuntu are losing direction a little bit. Ubuntu is becoming "bloat ware", not performing very well on older PC's and in some cases either refusing to install or an upgrade to the latest version caused major problems as support for older PC's is being withdrawn.
I have tried several alternatives but my favourite flavour at the moment is LMDE. Has installed on everything I have tried it on (laptops and PC's) even an older PC with a Via Gig processor (Ubuntu just didn't want to know, even the alternative and server installs failed). Only downside to it is that I couldn't find a way to easily utilise software RAID with it. The installer has been overly simplified and doesn't give RAID options.
One of the advantages of Ubuntu used to be that it would happily run on older hardware so when the latest version of windoze came out that struggled, Ubuntu was an viable alternative. Not many new users are going to buy a new PC for Linux and turned to Ubuntu to keep their older hardware running. They are now loosing this market.
I can understand why they chose to switch to Unity due to the problems that the latest version of Gnome is having and it may well turn out eventually to be a viable alternative but the path they are going down at the moment seems to be loosing them a lot of support.
Just a little pet hate of mine is "Live CD's". Hate having to wait for the live CD to boot up before you can do an installation. The option to install before it boots doesn't seem to be there. I would much prefer to have the option to just install and also an option to use a text based installer (with the original Debian partitioner would be even better). Ubuntu does give the options with their Alternative Installs but Mint doesn't.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Wayne Stallwood" ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk To: main@lists.alug.org.uk Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2011 11:14 AM Subject: Re: [ALUG] ubuntu 11.10
On 14/10/11 17:10, nev young wrote:
Oh my. Oh dear.
I've just upgraded (one of) my ubuntu VBoxes from 11.04 to 11.10.
How do I get the nice previous gnome desktop back and get rid of the abomination that has replaced it.
Of course, I 'spect everyone will think the BIG clicky bar down the left is k3wl and I'm just being an old fart.
No not necessarily.
I was using the Unity interface on 11.04 for my secondary machine so thought there was no harm letting the main machine upgrade to 11.10 and it's "enforced" Unity.
Oh dear.....either I have come to the party too early (that said it is after release day) or Unity just gave me a massive downgrade in user experience...Despite cited Unity usability improvements my experience here is actually worse than 11.04.
Nothing is configurable without installing extra packages which will be hopelessly confusing for new users...Without installing the gnome tweaks panel and ccsm and short of dipping into gconf there are literally no configuration options. Even then some stuff just seems to be set in stone the behaviour of the "Dash" thing for example.
I want to default to opening on the Applications view not the Shortcuts one with the Shortcuts you don't even seem to be able to define yourself.
The only positive things I can say are that it does look pretty (on compiz capable hardware..not tried it in fallback mode) and everything seems to work well with a dark theme which is something I have often struggled with.
On top of everything else due to a problem the new kernel is having correctly throttling my Core i7 I seem to suffer about 20% performance loss if I boot the 3.0.x kernel.
Looks like the entire household may have to go minty.
Yeh currently booting a few options in VM's to see if it is time for a switch, LMDE is one of them.
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