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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 yesterday, and the experience sucked. It broke Firefox and Emacs, and it took me a lot of fiddling to get back to a desktop I can live with. Turns out, for instance, that you have to alt right click the bottom and top bars in Gnome classic, to modify them. Not exactly an easy thing to figure out if you've just been right clicking them for years.

Time for Ubuntu to stop dicking around with all the UI stuff and go back to making something that is solid. I really liked it when it first came out: it was a fairly dependable system that had regular updates, and was 'good enough' in the polish department. I could use it on desktops and servers alike and be pretty happy with it.

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I "sidegraded" to mint 11 right after the dubiously-named "upgrade" to 11.10 which broke the ubuntu 'classic' desktop. Mint had a normal interface and behaved as one would expect. Given how close the base was to ubuntu, the transition went smoothly. And I like green better than whatever undefined color ubuntu is anyway.

I recently upgraded to mint 12 and they are picking up a bit of the gnome3 suckiness - but it feels like they are really being unwillingly dragged into it and are fighting tooth an nail to keep it at bay. It is a bit worse than mint 11, but still a lot better than ubuntu 11.10. Maybe I should give that MATE thing a shot.

The only thing I kinda miss from ubuntu is the inplace upgrade process. Mint community seems to have some philosophical rejection of it and recommends a reinstall.

I am feeling that Ubuntu is pushing realy HARD to get into tablet space - throwing-users-under-the-bus-if-need-be kind of hard. I can see the advantage of a Unity interface there, but come on, i had to manually tweak the laptop with powertop to even get close to the battery life I was getting with windows. This will never work for an average-joe-grade tablet.

I know, I know It is free, if i dont like it, I can switch to something else. Guess what? I did. According to distrowatch i'm not the only one. It is a real pity to see a good distro go down like that.

I tried to switch to Mint 12. Turns out that they have awesome bugs with fglrx integration (bugs neither Ubuntu nor Fedora have).

I was kind of sad. In between the corrupted fonts and flickering windows it actually (no sarcasm) looked really really great.

> Mint community seems to have some philosophical rejection of it and recommends a reinstall.

I was doing in-place upgrades of Debian in the late 90ies, and they generally went quite smoothly. Not being able to to do that gives me a strong urge to use blunt terms like "horse shit". In-place upgrades are one of the reasons why you have an advanced package management system in the first place, and abandoning that is a huge step backwards. I do, after all, use this stuff on servers too.

Don't get me wrong. It is possible, the community website provides an accurate walkthrough[1] of how to do so and it looks totally scriptable. Mint just doesnt seem to have the "fire and forget" option ubuntu has. Their justification is that there is a risk of data loss/system corruption (see section E1 in link) :

> The only advantage Ubuntu offers is that it makes the process trivial and fully automated. Though, considering the risks and the way it upgrades your system, this should be considered dangerous.

[1]http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

I also sidegraded to mint 11 last year, and I tried upgrading to mint 12 but I didn't like the extra fluff they added, so I'm sticking with mint 11 for now. At some point I might just do a headless install of Ubuntu 11.10 and then install the LXDE and a few choice apps from there. We'll see, I'm open to trying something new, but I prefer minimalism.

might want to give Lubuntu a try(ubuntu with lxde instead of Gnome). I switched from ubuntu to lubuntu when Gnome 3 came out, and I've been very pleased.

"Time for Ubuntu to stop dicking around with all the UI stuff and go back to making something that is solid."

Yeah, no kidding. Their problem isn't that they're just not X steps ahead of everyone else, it's that they aren't even close to the same level as OS X or Windows. They need to stop trying to be so clever and focus on the basics.

How do they get close if they don't try? Perhaps it's just the contrarian in me, but I'm glad to see some movement here. Admittedly, though, it does seem a bit "shoehorned" in, and not terribly discoverable, but I'll withhold judgment until I've tried it. I can't live without something QuickSilver-like at this point, so I should be well within their target audience.

Trying it is awesome, but only if it's an extra, not something that's happening in place, of, say, testing their distribution's upgrade process, testing it on disparate hardware, and other tedious things like that that make for a pleasant experience.

Entirely agree, people always defend Ubuntu's action by saying that they are after a different class of user (e.g the developers mum rather than the developer) and this is why they are changing the UI.

What they fail to realize is that even with the best UI in the world if 6 months down the line joe public clicks the "yes please upgrade me to the new ubuntu" button and then magically his wifi and sound break and his UI is replaced with something totally different that requires re-learning they are going to lose confidence pretty fast.

My wife, who is certainly smart and inquisitive, but not a 'power user', has been using Ubuntu just fine for several years with little intervention on my behalf, and she's going to have the same reaction I did when we upgrade her computer:

"Where the fuck did everything move to?!"

Which I guess is fine if you're willing to throw current users under the bus in the hopes of attracting lots of new users who will have never used the older versions.

(Admittedly, the neutrality of the experiment has already been somewhat compromised because she heard me swearing up and down about the upgrade last night)

I dunno. I run 10.10 at home and 11.10 at work (both relatively new machines). I really, really, really like hitting the super key and getting the dash, typing fire and hitting enter and opening firefox. In addition, you can hit super and a number and it opens the app in that number.

Maybe i just didnt love gnome2 enough. That being said, I really hate the way Unity appears to have broken the readline interface (for emacs shortcuts everywhere). Maybe I'm missing something, but I couldn't get that working in either 11.04 or .10.

Install Gnome-Do or Synapse, and you can press the Super (or preferred) key in any desktop environment, and do the same thing, faster.

I started with Ubuntu in 2006 and I don't remember a time when they were ever "solid" or didn't break things up upgrades. Rule of thumb has always been to partition a separate /home and do a clean install every time. Maybe back when they were closer to Debian, but then that's just Debian's stability (not Ubuntu's).

Alt+Click is such a bad idea. How is a new user ever going to discover that? I am probably using Unity wrong (only occasionally on my old notebook), but I frequently am only able to do taks because I now they existed from previous versions. For example launch the upgrade manager.

Alt-click isn't part of Unity, he's talking about the GNOME fallback desktop, which doesn't ship in Ubuntu by default.

Yeah, I just meant I had similar troubles with Unity.

Right. In Gnome 3, you don't even seem to get launchers that you can add where you want. You get some kind of activities thing. I want to press a button and get a new rxvt, not go play activities with the teletubbies.

Xfce looks like it may be an interesting alternative at this point. Gnome "fallback", or "classic" mostly does what I want, but with a name like that, it doesn't sound like something that will get much love/maintenance in the future.

Reminds me of how I would configure Windows XP to classic view immediately after installation for years...

Unfortunately, you (and I) are no longer GNOME's audience; We aren't who they're interested in targeting anymore. This would irk me less if GNOME 3 was a new/separate project instead of the future of GNOME 2, but c'est la vie. I've been trying to use XFCE instead, but in reality it falls short of GNOME 2 in so many ways it could never be a replacement.

Fortunately, some people have forked GNOME 2 and plan on continuing its development under the name MATE, and they have Ubuntu/Debian repositories up.

https://github.com/Perberos/Mate-Desktop-Environment

I'm not sure who their audience is. There are other people making much more usable desktops for the general populace.

I like gnome2 because I can customise the hell out of it and have things like separate task bars on each monitor.

> Turns out, for instance, that you have to alt right click the bottom and top bars in Gnome classic, to modify them.

I had assumed that they just dropped support for applets. Thankyou for telling me that.

How the hell is anyone going to just discover that?

For once I read "dicking around with all the UI stuff" and it's really "dicking" not "clicking".

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