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Comment by buster | Hacker News Reader

I think it's time for me to switch from Ubuntu to LMDE. Lately i was thinking a lot about Canonical and the many decisions they did, which i disagreed with (i don't like Unity, i don't like the Mir "disaster", i think efforts should be combined and not made to split the Linux community).

But it's not so easy to switch, because Ubuntu really is the most desktop friendly Linux distro out there. I was considering Fedora (but i like dpkg!) and Debian (but i like bleeding edge!). So this will give me the nicely designed Cinnamon Desktop, the awesomeness of Debian, without too much breakage by using debian testing..

Yep.. Good Bye, Canonical. After years of Ubuntu usage, after switching from Debian to Ubuntu i'm switching back. Debian has goals i can identify with, Canonical tries too much to create yet-another-incompatible-replacement-for-XYZ instead of fixing stuff (upstart, lightdm, mir, unity come to mind).

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It's worth noting that cinnamon is an incompatible fork of gnome shell: they don't upstream their changes, it requires mint to run, patch sets at least for fedora are not fully functional, they don't appear to be interested in a multi-distro source base.

Better than unity/cannonical by far, but not nearly as good as gnome/redhat for the community. Consider that cinnamon wouldn't be possible without the efforts of the gnome 3 team in targeting the whole community.

I'm guessing, but probably the GNOME upstream don't want Cinnamon's patches?

It doesn't require Mint to run - I'm posting this comment from Cinnamon running on Debian Unstable. Cinnamon is also in the ubuntu 12.10 repos.

They need to carry distro specific patches though, that was my point. This also leads to most plugins not working without modification, at least on fedora.

Why not just use Debian testing? After Ubuntu made Unity the default I switched to Debian and was pretty happy with it. AFAIK that's what becomes Ubuntu every 6 months anyway. The biggest Canonical contribution to Linux community has always been fonts, so I just copied all my fontconfig and Ubuntu fonts to my Debian install.

But then Gnome3 happened. And it was far worse than Unity - it killed virtual desktops. XFCE and KDE are not my cups of tea either, so I tried the latest Unity again and was surprised that they've fixed the most obvious issues. So I'm back on Ubuntu for now.

Gnome 3 has virtual desktops; they're created and destroyed on demand. You can also configure static desktops using Gnome Tweak tool.

But you get a list of all apps via Alt-Tab. There is no isolation, so I end up with OSX-like mess of apps. Each desktop must have its own list of apps.

I submitted that as a bug to Gnome bugzilla and they told me that's "by design". I later found a 3rd party shell extension to fix it, but it was ugly as hell and kept breaking after each version bump. So I gave up. Besides, I do not want to rely on 3rd party extensions for core functionality, like switching between applications.

There is a 2nd reason why their dynamic workspaces cannot be used as a replacement for proper virtual desktops: the desktop numbers (index) keep changing: if I have desktops #1, #2 and #3 (and I use shortcuts for them, like Win+1, Win+2, etc), and I close the last window in desktop #2, Gnome3 immediately kills #3 and moves all its windows to #2. That's insane. It won't allow me to have an empty desktop in the middle.

You can fix the Alt Tab behavior by using AlternateTab extension[1]. It works perfectly fine for me in Ubuntu 12.10 with Gnome 3.6.2

[1]: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/

I made a decision to leave OS "tweak" utils behind when I got rid of Windows. The existence of these utils is a smell, and a signal to look elsewhere.

I switched for similar reasons (though it was before the Mir "disaster"), and have been very, very happy with it. The maintainers are very good at not passing along packages from debian-testing that will break your stuff.

Actually, the packages in Debian Testing and Unstable branches are usually the same versions or more recent than Ubuntu.

The names sound scary, but I think Ubuntu actually takes the Testing packages anyway. In 8 or 9 years I don't recall having any problems using Testing as my day to day desktop.

Unstable is also pretty solid, but every in a great while there will be some dependency problem or other breakage that can be a real PITA. It's fun to play with new features, and I use it for one of my home laptops, but I wouldn't use it to get work done, just in case.

> I think Ubuntu actually takes the Testing packages anyway.

The automatic synchronization actually picks from unstable. Not that it changes a lot, because the majority of packages end up migrating. I'm not too familiar with the ubuntu processes, but I assume that if the next ubuntu release contains uninstallable packages (or other things that can happen in unstable but should not in testing), they reimport a later package.

> The names sound scary, but I think Ubuntu actually takes the Testing packages anyway

Ubuntu LTS releases are based on Testing, other normal releases are based on Unstable.

I managed to actually "tame" unity. I like the concept of of it but viscerally hated the fact that they forced their lefty dock on us, seriously? I managed to permanently hide it (installed AWN instead) and configured a screen corner to summon the dash (which also features the unity dock) in essence functioning like gnome3's dash. It's a pretty neat configuration once their dock is out of sight. I love the global menu, somehow they managed to screw it up when they first released it (even though they were copying one that was perfectly functional) but now it works at it is supposed to.

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