What was I saying? They've just released the Ubuntu 11.10 Beta, and looking at this review, I have to say I think it looks absolutely fantastic. Unity is really coming into its own thing now, and really looks a band apart. Really swish.

Of course, it has to be solid under the hood too, so with that in mind I'm downloading it and I'll see what it's like. The last two releases (10.10 and 11.04) have been fairly dreadful for me for one reason or another, so I'm really hoping this changes that.

I tried 11.04 and to be honest the interface was fiddly and buggy as hell when I tried it, hope they've sorted that out in 11.10, however the October release is generally just a cosmetic update from the April release.

Quite tempted to give Fedora a go, I've heard that it is more stable than Ubuntu.

I tried dual booting Sabayon with Mint but the Gnome 3 desktop was a menace here too. I ended up reinstalling Mint (if it ain't broke . . . . etc.).
A pity because Sabayon is very attractive despite its updates taking forever.

Well I've had a wee play with Ubuntu 11.10 now. It's definitely a massive improvement as far as Unity is concerned, that's for sure. There's now icons at the bottom of the dash that take you to Applications/System/Places etc (named differently, but the result is the same), and you now have a Gnome 3 style applications list in the dash which was sorely missed in 11.04. The whole thing generally looks attractive, really plush and distinctively "Ubuntu".

I still don't find it as nice to use as Gnome 3 though. All expected mouse actions produce consistent results on Gnome 3. It really is a joy to use. Fast and simple. But with Unity there's pauses while the bar appears (or doesn't), you can't minimise an application from the Unity bar by clicking the icon again. Lots of little things like that. With Gnome 3, it just responds as it should once you know how it works (which isn't hard). You still get the feeling too that Unity is a little fussy and demanding. I'm not sure that hiding the window buttons is a great move either, but I suppose you'd get used to it.

It is, however, very nice and functional if you are prepared to spend a little time with it. I'm just still not convinced it's a Gnome 3 beater personally, though obviously I've only had a limited time with it, compared to 5/6 months of using Gnome 3.

I did get a crash from gnome-settings-daemon, which is something that caused me no end of trouble on the past two releases, and it was disappointing to see it again (I've not had it once on openSUSE Gnome 3). But there's time yet to fix things, and I can still be turned back to Ubuntu if it's good enough at release.

I'm still on 10.10 - it's nice to know that Ubuntu is 'getting there' but lordy they've taken liberties with the conservative non-fanboy users of late (as has Gnome 3 and as did KDE 4).

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/09/p...ring-beta.html

Ta for the tip about Chakra - been running Arch for about a year now, but want something a little easier.

Will give it a try.

Cor, that looks marvellous! Thanks for sharing.

Unlike the Gnome, Ubuntu and Apple guys the KDE guys seem to understand that different classes of device need different interfaces, instead of trying to shoehorn the same interface into every class of device no matter how unsuitable.

I think KDE is on the right track, though i still don't see what purpose a tablet fulfils.

I think Gnome 3 is on the right track too. It's customisable with Javascript, so any hardware manufacturer could tailor it if they wanted to pretty easily (from what I gather - I'm not a coder!). It seems to me to be just as capable of fitting any device as KDE. I think only Unity would be tricky on a pad or tablet, with its tiny buttons and fiddly bar, but then the Ubuntu team will tell you it's still very much a desktop OS.

I've always been a fan of Fedora because it's very much both a leading edge and developer distro. It also helps that we use CentOS at work on both desktops and servers - Fedora's often a useful preview to see what'll be in CentOS in a few years time.

Fedora 15 was a disaster for me - half-baked systemd and a barely functioning GNOME 3 (I had to use fallback mode, which was a dismal experience compared to F14's GNOME 2). Even Fedora 16 alpha hasn't learned anything from the F15 fiasco (my HD4290 graphics still won't work with GNOME 3/Shell), so I may have consider changing my window manager (XFCE or something like it) to get a decent panel-based experience.

If you're after a long term Linux desktop release and aren't a novice, I'd actually recommend CentOS 6 at this point. 7 years of updates, the reliable System V initscripts, uses ext4 as the default filing system and, thankfully, a latter version of GNOME 2 that's a much better desktop expierence than GNOME 3 currently is (even Linus Torvalds thinks so!). Just be prepared to manually update your main apps such as Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice (I use the downloads from their respective sites), because CentOS deliberately lags way behind on those.

I keep hearing this about Fedora and Gnome 3. I find it really surprising considering just how stable and downright fab it's been on my openSUSE 11.4 install.

As for Linus' opinion of Gnome 3, well I didn't reckon much to his opinion of Gnome 2, and I certainly don't agree with him about Gnome 3! I don't agree either Gnome 2 is a better experience, but I've said this numerous times in this thread so I won't dredge it up again.

Xfce has come up once or twice in the debate over these radically altered desktop environments. (I think Linus said somewhere that he'd started using it.)

People say it's roughly analogous to a latter-day GNOME 2, with the obvious benefit that it's still being maintained and updated.

In my never-ending search for the perfect new DE, I had a bit of a mess around with it. It was passable, I guess, but seemed a little bit basic and lacking to run on my nice quad-core PC. It was a bit like going back to Windows XP in terms of polish.

Maybe the extra attention that's now being lavished on it from GNOME 3 / Unity refuseniks (and Linus!) will mean a little more polish is applied at some point, so it might be one to watch.

Anyone tried it, or any other lesser-known desktops?

I tried it, in the form of Linux Mint's new XFCE Debian Edition. There were a few bits and pieces missing, but on the whole i found it was almost right for me.

I did have plans to stick with Gnome 2 until the Debian Wheezy release then switch to KDE (probably 4.8 unless 4.9 manages to squeeze in before the freeze), but i'm now thinking of switching to XFCE.

I'm going to wait another six months or so before deciding. XFCE 4.10 is due out in January and it looks to have some nice features and polish, especially the file manager Thunar (which is already better than Nautilus IMO).

As graphic drivers seem to be a ongoing ''issue''! with Linux. If people would care to take a few minutes to fill this survey in it could be of a help to devs.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=lgs_2011

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?is...110905#feature

As it basically says, may be worth burning to cd and keeping safe, may help somebody out one day when it all goes t**s up

Edit ... Just noticed this thread is up to 17.5K views, so somebody is hopefully getting some useful info, nice one SCOOBY1970 For starting it, and nice to see it's stayed on topic

I for one have learned a lot from this thread, and didn't realise it would be so popular. I need to find time to post on here more, but have just changed jobs and had some other changes in my life which have been keeping me from posting as much as I should.

Mark

I don't even understand the questions.

I saw this and your subsequent posts and decided to give it a go as I'm distro 'shopping' at the moment.

I've tried the latest Ubuntu, Suse, Mint, Fedora and a few others.

Of all the distros I tried I like the Pinguy OS the best and have settled on that. What I really like is the desktop. It's not a perfect user interface, but (for me) is the best I've found so far.

If you're in the market for a new distro and are focused mainly on the desktop experience, give Pinguy OS a go.

Have they fixed the crashing though? I found FF would terminate abruptly when doing something simple (forget what). Apart from that I decided I would have adopted Pinguy as my favourite distro.

Pinguy OS as stable as a rock now, I have not had any crashes no matter what I throw at it on any of my machines!

Mark

Very happy for you, but i still prefer my

http://peppermintos.com/
http://peppermintos.com/team/
http://peppermintos.com/about-peppermint/

Joking aside i have tried http://pinguyos.com/ and it is a sound OS as is Peppermint and quite a few other ''minor!'' Linux OS.

In fact i haven't been near Mint or Ubuntu for a while now as finding the lesser (is that the right wording?) Linux OSs are actually better than the ''main stream ones''

I'll give it another whirl then. Thanks Mark.

as well I. I loathe Unity and refuse to use it even if my computer were new enough to use it properly. I tried a cut-down Unity 2D and switched back within a day. all those aesthetics have done a number on usability. Microsoft are bad for that and if Ubuntu are going the same way and trying to force it on people from 11.10 onwards it really will be goodby Ubuntu and hello Pinguy

The problem with that though, is that it uses Gnome 2, which is no longer being developed. In the short term that won't matter, but a couple of releases in and you may find that Pinguy's quality suffers. Gnome 2 was already starting to creak in later Ubuntu's imho. The switch to Gnome 3 and Unity was timely.

Having tried the 11.10 beta I quite like Unity. The problem for me with Ubuntu is usability bugs that ruin it. Random theme changes, Nvidia causing problems no matter what driver you use, there were a number of issues I had with 11.04, so I'm hoping 11.10 polishes it all up and makes it usable again.