Switching from Ubuntu

[sje]

Having used Ubuntu for some time, I have noticed three things:

1) General feature creep with the newly added features being poorly supported and of limited use to the experienced developer.

2) Dropped platform support (all PowerPC variants).

3) Dropped graphics support (I have an Acer/Nvidea combination which worked up to Ubuntu 10 but failed in 11 and the bug was still was not fixed in 12).

I am now switching from Ubuntu to plain old Debian on all my machines which can't handle Mac OS/X.

[kinderchocolate]

I dislike the the new interface comes with the latest Ubuntu. What's the name? I forgot. The interface was too slow on a virtual machine.

[sje]

Ubuntu has been copying the look/feel from Apple's Mac OS/X for some time, and that's problematic at best. If Ubuntu could do it well, then Apple would sue them out of existence. But Ubuntu can't do it well because they don't have enough sufficiently talented coders to make the copied GUI eye candy work fast enough and without glitches.

Also, the main reason for Apple's look/feel feature creep is to force full-system replacement upgrades. Several recent dual core and quad core 64 bit Intel Macintosh models have been obsoleted by the latest version of Mac OS/X.

Anyway, http://www.debian.org/ is the place to go. Unless you have funding; then you might try http://www.redhat.com/ which is what I used for years back when they were free.

[kongsian]

I hated the Unity desktop and switch to Linux Mint MATE.

Kong Sian

[kinderchocolate]

Ubuntu has been copying the look/feel from Apple's Mac OS/X for some time, and that's problematic at best. If Ubuntu could do it well, then Apple would sue them out of existence. But Ubuntu can't do it well because they don't have enough sufficiently talented coders to make the copied GUI eye candy work fast enough and without glitches.

Also, the main reason for Apple's look/feel feature creep is to force full-system replacement upgrades. Several recent dual core and quad core 64 bit Intel Macintosh models have been obsoleted by the latest version of Mac OS/X.

Anyway, http://www.debian.org/ is the place to go. Unless you have funding; then you might try http://www.redhat.com/ which is what I used for years back when they were free.

Yeah, I agree. The Ubuntu Unity is absolutely horrible.

[zamar]

I am now switching from Ubuntu to plain old Debian on all my machines which can't handle Mac OS/X.

Good choice. Debian with extremely light X-window-manager (fluxbox) has served me well over the years.

I tried ubuntu some years back, but I found most of the new features only confusing...

The only thing I dislike in Debian is Freedom-fanatism. They have a fetish to remove every "non-free bit" from OS no matter how grave problems it can cause to their users.

[Don]

Having used Ubuntu for some time, I have noticed three things:

1) General feature creep with the newly added features being poorly supported and of limited use to the experienced developer.

2) Dropped platform support (all PowerPC variants).

3) Dropped graphics support (I have an Acer/Nvidea combination which worked up to Ubuntu 10 but failed in 11 and the bug was still was not fixed in 12).

I am now switching from Ubuntu to plain old Debian on all my machines which can't handle Mac OS/X.

I am using Ubuntu 12.04 but you can install the cinnamon desktop which is basically a great desktop - pretty much exactly the way it was before they started changing the look and feel.

Before I found that I was experimenting with other distributions but they all seem to be moving in that basic direction.

A friend of mind also recommended just installing the Xfce desktop which is very stable between versions, no surprises every time you wish to upgrade. I tried that too but I thought gnome pretty much had it right and is far more polished.

There are actually many choices - I think in general you can make most of the work your way if you are willing to invest a lot of time figuring out how to configure it to get it the way you want - but I don't have the time or energy to re-learn a new desktop every 6 months.

To some people their desktop is a life-style fashion statement but to me it's a necessary evil that usually just gets in my way.

The unix bash shell is so powerful that I actually considered setting up my desktop as a server without a GUI - you can have multiple virtual terminals easily, switch between them, set up fonts so that you can have a very large terminal (many lines) and of course you can use screen to pretty much has an unlimited number of them. But sometimes you just have to have a GUI. My thought was to use my laptop for check mail and browsing the web and my desktop for serious work. But I'm not quite that adventurous.

[bob]

Ubuntu has been copying the look/feel from Apple's Mac OS/X for some time, and that's problematic at best. If Ubuntu could do it well, then Apple would sue them out of existence. But Ubuntu can't do it well because they don't have enough sufficiently talented coders to make the copied GUI eye candy work fast enough and without glitches.

Also, the main reason for Apple's look/feel feature creep is to force full-system replacement upgrades. Several recent dual core and quad core 64 bit Intel Macintosh models have been obsoleted by the latest version of Mac OS/X.

Anyway, http://www.debian.org/ is the place to go. Unless you have funding; then you might try http://www.redhat.com/ which is what I used for years back when they were free.

Redhat is still free. It is called "Fedora" and it is what I use, although I did not migrate to the most recent version because I do not like what the Gnome guys have done. Older gnome worked perfectly well. Then they had to change EVERYTHING, from how you start things automatically, to preference settings (there is no "focus follows mouse", for example, you have to click on a window to switch focus, which I do not like). But it has worked flawlessly on every machine I have tried over the past 5 years or so. wireless. bluetooth. Graphics card options. You name it. Intel CC compiler complains on install but works perfectly.

[Don]

Ubuntu has been copying the look/feel from Apple's Mac OS/X for some time, and that's problematic at best. If Ubuntu could do it well, then Apple would sue them out of existence. But Ubuntu can't do it well because they don't have enough sufficiently talented coders to make the copied GUI eye candy work fast enough and without glitches.

Also, the main reason for Apple's look/feel feature creep is to force full-system replacement upgrades. Several recent dual core and quad core 64 bit Intel Macintosh models have been obsoleted by the latest version of Mac OS/X.

Anyway, http://www.debian.org/ is the place to go. Unless you have funding; then you might try http://www.redhat.com/ which is what I used for years back when they were free.

Redhat is still free. It is called "Fedora" and it is what I use, although I did not migrate to the most recent version because I do not like what the Gnome guys have done. Older gnome worked perfectly well. Then they had to change EVERYTHING, from how you start things automatically, to preference settings (there is no "focus follows mouse", for example, you have to click on a window to switch focus, which I do not like). But it has worked flawlessly on every machine I have tried over the past 5 years or so. wireless. bluetooth. Graphics card options. You name it. Intel CC compiler complains on install but works perfectly.

I briefly looked at Fedora and there is way to set up focus follow mouse. That is a big deal to me for usability as I generally have several windows open and don't like to constantly be fussing with them.

I don't remember the procedure but it did involved manually editing some configuration file - you cannot do it directly.

[Joerg Oster]

Ubuntu has been copying the look/feel from Apple's Mac OS/X for some time, and that's problematic at best. If Ubuntu could do it well, then Apple would sue them out of existence. But Ubuntu can't do it well because they don't have enough sufficiently talented coders to make the copied GUI eye candy work fast enough and without glitches.

Also, the main reason for Apple's look/feel feature creep is to force full-system replacement upgrades. Several recent dual core and quad core 64 bit Intel Macintosh models have been obsoleted by the latest version of Mac OS/X.

Anyway, http://www.debian.org/ is the place to go. Unless you have funding; then you might try http://www.redhat.com/ which is what I used for years back when they were free.

Redhat is still free. It is called "Fedora" and it is what I use, although I did not migrate to the most recent version because I do not like what the Gnome guys have done. Older gnome worked perfectly well. Then they had to change EVERYTHING, from how you start things automatically, to preference settings (there is no "focus follows mouse", for example, you have to click on a window to switch focus, which I do not like). But it has worked flawlessly on every machine I have tried over the past 5 years or so. wireless. bluetooth. Graphics card options. You name it. Intel CC compiler complains on install but works perfectly.

But for a 'normal' user, especially those switching from Windows, Fedora is a pain in the ass when it comes to proprietary codecs, graphic-card driver, etc. Ubuntu or Linux Mint are much more user-friendly in this regard.

Currently I run Linux Mint 13 with the xfce-desktop. Though I really loved the Unity-Desktop of Ubuntu at first, I must admit it has its disadvantages.