You're both right, as Mint seems obsessed with using its own menu setup. then using something else apart from Gnome most people wouldn't know any different. The desktop would look the same as the gnome based one

Do wish they would take up and run with the E17 desktop, as PCLinuxOS have stopped doing it Now they did know how to pimp a os

Have to keep playing with Bohdi E17 for now

http://forums.bodhilinux.com/index.p.../page__st__900

Bodhi is lovely. It proved too much for our Eee sadly, but I did like what I saw. Don't hate me though, but I did find E17 a bit fussy (insofar as there's a lot of available customisation and menus!), but when you consider what it uses it's very impressive. I didn't know PCLOS had stopped their E17 edition.

Yes its far from perfect, but for what it is and how it runs, and also the very LITTLE attention or development its getting its good.
If the devs at Mint were to get hold of it and stick there menu etc on it, who knows what could happen,

been farting around with a few things tonight and just knocking up a few dvd's of various video clips 'n the like, so while i'm in a farting around kind of mood i'll give 11.10 a wazz.

i know the beta worked just fine if i wanted to stay with unity but i'll see what happens when i ram gnome 3 up it's jacksy

just looking at the bodhi linux forum though and some of those desktops are absolutely gorgeous. almost enough to possible tempt me .. heh

11.10's the first release since I started with 7.04 the just wont work at all on 2 types of hardware

an AS Rock K7s41 just a white desktop .
and a Gigabyte GA-M61PME with on board graphics in use. nothing usable loads just a mass of colours.

Well, as expected, unity worked fine but when I wanted to run Gnome 3 it all went to pot so a big MEH from me

You don't like Unity?

I don't really, no. It's not completely awful but it just doesn't really do it for me - doesn't really have the wow factor that Gnome 3 has I guess.

I still want to give Bodhi another whirl though - that could potentially sway me.

Yeah I take your point with Unity. I've gotten more used to it now, but I still can't escape the feeling of it being form over function. I noted yesterday that it seems to use slightly more memory than Gnome 3+shell too.

The main issues with it for me are the main dash home page, and the launcher bar triggering by accident. The main dash needs a bit of a re-jig to make it more natural to use. The lenses and filters need to be apparent from the first click of the dash button imho, and not discoverable only through a series of searches. However, I'm now getting accustomed to using the four top buttons rather than using the lenses at the bottom of the dash to find stuff, and this has proved much quicker. Any of the four will take you directly into the application overview much like Gnome shell, with "More Apps" being particularly useful. It would be nice if it remembered what you were doing after a reboot though, so the filters remain consistent, but that's just me. So on that score, it's not so different really.

The main thing is this release is very solid and stable. I've had no real crashes or anything killer, so I've stayed with it thus far.

I gave up on Unity and currently use Lubuntu - does Unity still merge the app's menu bar into the bar at the top of the screen?

it does indeed - if you use firefox you have to manually disable the top bar integration if you want the layout to work correctly - at least that's what i have to do.

I really like the global menus. It's one thing I think works really well and makes my widescreen monitor feel widescreen.

Just installed ubuntu 11.10. Everything seems to work ok including audacity which I use alot plus LottaNZB and transmission so I'm happy. Unity is a bit messy imo. You have to do alot more clicks to start programmes that you ought to. I'm not too struck on the dashboard tbh but if that's the way ubuntu's going I'll have to get used to it.
Overall though quite pleased with it

Well so far so good with 11.10 apart from a small problem with PulseAudio and Teamspeak 3 which meant I could hear but not talk. Solved the problem by removing PulseAudio and running just Alsa and it appears to work.

I just click the dash, and any of the 4 buttons will take you to the programs menu. It's possibly one more click than going say System/Administration/Nvidia Settings or whatever it was in Gnome 2, and you don't even have to use the mouse if you don't want to. I think it's neat but it's proving very different for some. Gawd knows what they'll think of Windows 8.

True it's no big deal ....I usually type the first couple of letters in `the dash search and you're there which is really fast.`Just a bit different. I'm very pleased with it so far...no problems at all. Unlike windows7 64 bit yesterday when their updates totally wrecked my system. It wouldn't even boot up so I had to re-image from a recent back up I made. Very annoying to say the least

Yeah, it's not like I ration clicks or anything. Compare it to KDE4. I mean, I've been running it for a while now with PCLinuxOS, and there's no doubt it's an amazing DE, but trawling through its menus can be a real drag. Trying to find a terminal in there for example can be difficult if you've no room to add one to your plasma launcher! No matter how long I use it for, I can never remember the menu it comes under, so I end up having to search around for it.

Now I'm not gonna complain about KDE4, as it's a marvellous thing, but it's not especially easy to use for anyone. Adapting is a fact of life for anyone using multiple OS's.

I can't get on with kde desktops for some reason. The very first distro I d/led was mandriva a couple of years ago which used kde. I've tried a few with kde but can't get on with them. I think it's the bouncing cursor that does my head in. Just had my first bug with 11.10 it hung when I turned off so I had to use the power button which I don't like doing. It's booted up ok though so I'll try it again.
Update I just turned off with no problems so hopefully it was nothing serious.

I am soon starting to develop my own distro based on Debian (as it is rock solid). Any suggestions? Will probably use Gnome 2x.

At least make the graphics drivers easy to install

If it starts doing that with me I'll go back to openSUSE. If there's one thing that grinds my gears with Ubuntu it's crashes and bugs. Not really had anything serious yet, but there's always the chance. No OS should be doing this imo nowadays, and I've not had any other Linux do this, but Ubuntu does tend to be susceptible to these things. Fingers crossed it won't.

Why Gnome 2 as it wont be supported?

you would be better with LXDE or XFCE Etc

Also it start to cost and you will need money to support servers forums etc, how you going to do it on you're own?

or did you mean you would like to build you're own personal distro from scratch?
Thats more like http://www.slackware.com/

http://www.gentoo.org/

I do like Bodhi - tried it again earlier on. I think if i had the inclanation to give it a couple of hours i could get it all set up and get everything installed that i need - i like the idea of a barebones system but I guess I equally have to be arsed to actually do something with it.

Tried Fedora 16 again as well - bet you can't guess how that turned out

Tried it myself today. Everything was going great until the Synaptic Package Manager broke on me. Might have another go later on or be lazy and install pinguy or zorin then just remove the programmes I don't want.

Uh-oh .. it appears that Sabayon Linux has a Gnome 3.2 desktop environment .. i think we all know what that means