[…] Gnome Flashback also known as gnome-session-fallback or gnome-panel. A must have for Ubuntu users, because Unity sucks. […]

since you’ve mentioned you want a stable OS that doesn’t update every 6 months, why don’t you just use Debian?

@ opensas:

Thank you sir, there are some good suggestions there. Bookmarked. :)

@ Karthik:

Yeah, as many people mentioned in this thread already both Gnome 3 and KDE 4 made some pretty radical design choices giving up performance and stability for glitz and glamour. Few years ago we had this big push in the Linux community to simplify, preatify and streamline… Which is good to a degree, but I think we might have went overboard with hit.

I used to love KDE. Back in the day it was the shit. Konqueror was a shitty web browser but a great file manager and I never understood why they replaced it with Dolphin which wasn’t as mature and had a fraction of the functionality.

Hell, Knoppix was a great utility distro back in the day but these days I find it barely usable because by default it loads with all the bullshit Compiz animations and transitions turned on. I used to use it all the time to recover files from dead machines, but it’s kinda annoying when you’re trying to rescue data from the windows partition and your file manager windows burst into flames and wobble as you move them around. :/

On reading your post, I briefly switched back to the classic Gnome 2 desktop with no Compiz. It was like moving from a glitzy hotel with unfinished rooms, poor room service and dodgy attendants to an old home with a well worn couch where everything is in arm’s reach. Over the past two years, I’d somehow come to accept Unity’s irritating desktop metaphors and glacial performance as the standard for Linux. In fact, Unity’s usability problems had also subtly driven me towards Windows for non-gaming activities.

It’s weird. A couple of years ago I decided I’d had enough WM hopping for one lifetime (I’ve used everything from a no-X framebuffer/CLI setup to Openbox to Awesome to KDE) and settled on Unity because that’s what Ubuntu gave me with the least fuss. Going back to Gnome 2.x is liberating now.

Here you have a couple of tips to make your life with ubuntu easier, and to improve a little bit on the performance side
http://opensas.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/taming-the-raring-ringtail/

@ Craig A. Betts:

Yes, the focus following mouse is great. I always try to scroll the background window when I’m on Windows and get annoyed when it doesn’t go. It drove me nuts in Unity as well, though I can see why they changed it seeing how average users tend to be spastic and uncoordinated with their mouse.

@ FX:

Yep, strangely enough that sort of thing kinda works in OSX. That said I generally use OSX on a 15″ laptop screen using the touch pad, whereas my experience with Ubuntu was using two 26″ displays, and a 5 button mouse. So it is quite a different environment, quite a different amount of screen relestate and etc..

@ Kevin Benko:

Funnily enough Ubuntu works fairly well on the server. I run Debian and Ubuntu on few headless machines and they behave rather similarly. That said, Ubuntu usually tends to be more bloated so for older machines I usually go with a bare bones Debian.

@ Chris Wellons:

I might need to mess around with Openbox one of these days. The whole “everything configured via portable text files” is definitely an enticing idea.

@ Rudemeister:

Heh, my first distro was also Mandiva… Only it went by a much cooler name back then: Mandrake. This actually seem to be a pattern – a lot of people who started messing around with Linux around the same time I did got their first steps on Mandrake. I guess it was the Ubuntu of it’s day. :P

I tried SuSE for a few weeks many years ago – I think before it was swallowed by Novell. Back then though networking rarely worked out of the box to begin with so I didn’t notice any major issues. It was a different day.

Speaking of which, didn’t Linus post a major rant about SuSE networking not so long ago? Something about his daughters not being able to connect to WiFi networks without root passwords or something?

Craig A. Betts wrote:

Also, as a professional system administrator, it is good for me to learn multiple environments so I can better support them.

How often do you expect to support Ubuntu users though? I can totally get behind practicing raw unix skills in a CLI environment, because chances are I can find myself on a locked down server where I’m not allowed to install anything or import any config files. But I don’t really see many scenarios where I would have to support anyone running Ubuntu+Unity because most of my friends and relatives are either firmly stuck in Windows world or left Windows for OSX. The few people I know who do run Linux typically don’t need or ask for support. :P

@ Alex:

Looks nice. I might check it out, but most of virtual desktop software for windows had similar problems: they were kinda slow, buggy and would kinda stutter hiding things on the task bar. They always felt sluggish and none had a pager that would function the way the Gnome or KDE one does.

@ Mitlik:

Wow, Gentoo is on that fast upgrade train too? Seems kinda weird that a distro that insists on compiling every thing from source (which takes a really long time) would adopt such a scheme. :P

To avoid re-installation woes and Unity might I suggest trying out SolydXK – http://solydxk.com/ , it’s a new Debian based distro, desktop oriented, features a true rolling release, and offers Xfce and KDE support out of the box along with all the bells and whistles: codecs, propietary drivers, etc.

I love the comment about not wanting to upgrade every six months. This is exactly the reason I am drifting away from Gentoo. It seemed that just about every upgrade on world would stick me in kernel panic.

I have never tried Unity, but I am not into eye candy. I was a fast responsive system. I thought KDE3 was a great DE and didn’t slow things down too much, but KDE4 was unbearable. I have since took a direction from Mr Wellons and looked at the *boxen WMs. Fluxbox at least is fast and responsive. Maybe you should give one a try (with bbpager of course).

Agreed about Unity not having all the features I need. Because of that I tend to use Xubuntu whenever I need a Linux distro.

As for the pager for Windows – I use Dexpot for virtual desktops and it has a nice little pager plugin that works very well. It can drag windows between desktops, minimize or maximize them via right-click and a couple of other useful functions. It will detect your monitor layout and display it accordingly (I use a two monitor setup, one in landscape mode and one rotated 90degrees and they appear correctly in the pager).
Hope this helps.

The Linux kernel has gotten so good that it’s differences from distro to distro have become almost trivial and boring. My longest affair with a distro was Mandriva linux which nearly died a horrible and public death. It became the execution of the UI which was my biggest issue. OSX used to be so cool. Now it has become…..meh….boring. Gnome imploded with version 3. Gnome 2 was okay, but lacked the polish and fine finish of KDE. Yeah Mandriva was KDE too. So when Mandriva imploded I went distro hopping for a season. Mint with Cinnamon had possibilities, but Mint KDE was still prettier and easier to work with. But it always seemed like the red headed step child of the Mint guys. Kubuntu was okay, but…mmmm. quirkiness and an orphan also. Since this article is about Ubuntu and Unity though, let me just say the out of the box experience of Ubuntu Unity every time was as if my wife had just birthed an alien in my view. It nearly caused me to get a vasectomy. Oh gawd it was ugly. Yeah, it kinda worked okay, but that kid didn’t look like anything I would admit to as my spawn. I did not want to commit to a minor distro that would go extinct in a week or so. So I strived with Mint KDE for quite some time. I even tried OpenSuse, but it just didn’t work as good as the red headed step child, Mint KDE. Then they came out with OpenSuse 12.3. This has to be the most functional and pretty Linux distro ever. My love would soar above the clouds had the knucklehead devs made networking function by default like every other OS in the universe. So I gave Ubuntu 13.04 another try before my eyes started to bleed as I threw up. I guess I’ll endure the fine polish of OpenSuse 12.3 in spite of their no network default install faux pas. I appreciate the guts Canonical has, but I just can’t eat their dog food.