On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:58:44 +0100 Imran Chaudhry <ichaud...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a good Linux distro that meets the following > requirements: > > - must work easily with a Huwei 3G dongle > - Gnome 2.x > - easy to set-up encrypted home dir > - makes good use of a modern laptop (eg. usable webcam) > > I have been living with Ubunty 11.10 & Unity for the last two weeks > and while it has eye-candy, usability and much promise, I found it > hard to be efficient with it compared to Gnome 2 (especially where > one has multiple terminal windows). My conclusion is that it is not > suited for technical users. One can login with "Gnome Classic" but > for some reason the menu and icons look rather odd and I did not have > the patience to fix it. I really hope 12.04 maintains Gnome 2.x as > 10.04. I did try Gnome 3 but discarded it as it was not as "obvious" > to use as the alternatives. Debian with XFCE4 is what I have moved to for similar reason to your comments above, but I don't know if it meets your other requirements. XFCE4 does seem to meet my needs and doesn't come with all the baggage that Gnome (even Gnome2) does. I simply don't use all the stuff so many people think essential these days, ie I don't do social networking, blogging, instant messaging, internet phone, rss feeds, downloading/watching TV etc etc but it isn't possible to remove those un-wanted apps from gnome easily. My primary web browser is opera, though I do keep firefox installed for the odd website that doesn't play nicely with opera. Opera did tabbed browsing first and still does it better IMHO and it suits the way I use a web browser for accessing genealogy data in geneweb or on the internet. Since most of my genealogy data comes in pdf format I need acroread because the free pdf readers simply aren't good enough yet and I have been using sylpheed and its current incarnation claws-mail almost as long as I have been using linux based systems. I like to run each app in its own workspace and I need 2 or 3 terminal windows as I prefer to do aptitude-upgrades, accessing other local or remote systems using the command line and despite all the gui file managers there are I much prefer to use mc (in a terminal window), goes back to when I used dos and norton commander I suppose. It is amazing how deeply embedded gnome is and how difficult it is to purge the last lingering traces of it from the system. I suspect I may have removed too much, for example I am left with icons on the desk top for an external USB drive with one ext3 and one fat partition on it that I cannot open or mount other than as root, whereas gnome did allow this. For the moment I've use mountpy to find and mount the usb drive and I'll probably have to do the same when I plug in the camera. XFCE4 is much more configurable than LXDE but that is OK in its default setup for what I'll be using the Compaq N-160 for and light enough not to tax its limited resources. I now have XFCE4 on two systems and it is highly unlikely I'll go back to gnome. After all I was happily using windowmaker for many years and it was only when I installed 64bit Debian Sid that I went along with the default desktop. -- John Lewis using Debian sid -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
