[ale] I really incredibly exponentially hate ubuntu unity

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi all,

I was totally blown away by the number of replies to my original thread on this topic. I guess I really touched a nerve here. I want to thank everyone for all the information and hints they've shared. I can't really reply to all the replies directed at me, but will be looking over them again to see if any need a specific reply. I'm going to be archiving them all so I can refer to them if needed. Once Ubuntu 11.04 goes out of support, which I believe is Oct 2012, I will be forced to make some kind of change or have a more and more outdated system. I'll probably do what JD suggests below, ie install 12.04 and then the Gnome2 environment. I don't know exactly how yet, but I'll look it up later and perhaps test it in a VM. If that fails, I'll probably install Mint, or some of the more exotic options mentioned here. I believe Ubuntu 12.04 has support for 5 years. Wikipedia has a nice article on the subject which shows the various versions.

Sincerely,

Ron


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Please excuse my potential brevity.

(To whom it may concern. My email address has changed. Replying to former
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address. Please send all personal correspondence to the new address.)

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
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Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com


JD <jdp at algoloma.com> wrote:

On 05/15/2012 01:24 PM, Erik Mathis wrote:
> I installed 12.04 and after 45 min, I formatted and installed Mint.
> Give it a try.
> 

I installed 12.04 stock, after 10 minutes, I installed the Gnome2 DE and LXDE (2
separate envs controlled at the login screen). There's an easy "fallback" meta
package for this. No need to format and install something else. 12.04 is still
too new to trust ... perhaps in July or August, for now, I'm on 10.04 still for
my daily driver. Soon I'll install 12.04 onto bare hardware for server VM
migration needs ... test VMs to start followed by unimportant production VMs and
by the time I'm ready for the email server to be migrated off 8.04, the
stability of 12.04 will be completely known.

I prefer NOT having 3D accelerated graphics as mandatory. I'm here to work, no
look at raindrops or wobbly windows. ;)

Debian ... I installed "stable" with a desktop a few months ago. Things were
named funny and it was more trouble to figure out where to migration my
thunderbird, firefox and other profiles than I had patience to learn at the
time. Wiped. I'm sure there would have been a fairly easy way to get where I
wanted, but I simply didn't have time to fight it. In a few years, I don't want
to be 4 yrs behind on the "stable" release. Ubuntu gets me out of this issue
since 8.04.

Ubuntu feels homey to me after 6 yrs. I've run RH, Slackware, SUSE, Debian,
Mandrake, and a few other for over 6 months - most for a few years. I won't be
installing Ubuntu desktops anymore. It will be the LTS server release most of
the time and for my desktop, I'll add whatever WM or DE I prefer that year.
Simple and stable. Gentoo lasted about a month. For all that effort, I
expected it to actually be faster than stock Redhat. It wasn't. I played with
Arch for a week - it felt like a nicer Slackware. I still have friends running
slackware who I introduced to Linux in 1996. They are completely addicted.

Mint was fine - didn't seem different enough to warrant a change from Ubuntu.
Gone after a week.

When I was younger, I constantly tweaked my systems and was compiling programs,
kernels and modules that were not available except as TGZ bundles. These days, I
don't need to do that. The LTS version have stable programs for 2 years. when/if
I need something supported in a newer release, 14.04 LTS will be available. I
don't bother with the intermediate, non-LTS, releases. Not worth more than 30
minutes of my time.

Yep, Ubuntu Server LTS is easy enough and has plenty of support - patches,
programs, new releases. 'sudo apt-get install lxde' solves many Ubuntu desktop
issues. GUIs do not matter. You can put almost any GUI you want on almost any
Linux distro.
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