+1 for XFCE.
If you feel more strongly about your distro than your DE, the distro's
default DE is the way to go. Unity on Ubuntu is a lot better than it used
to be. (I hated the first release, but I now prefer it over Gnome.)
If you feel more strongly about your DE, then it works best to find a
distro that uses that DE by default. I've found that the primary DE of a
distro gets a lot of polish compared to the alternative DEs, and it's just
not worth the time and effort to fight the distro to run a different DE.
The other advice I would give is to do fresh installs rather than major
upgrades. I keep 4 major partitions: /boot, /home, and 2 system
partitions. When I want to upgrade, I do a fresh install into the system
partition I'm not using. (I use the package manager on the old system to
list the packages I need to install on the new system.) I mount the other
system partition to /oldsys in case I need a config file or something. If
I have too much trouble with the upgrade, I just boot back into the other
system partition. It's pretty much risk free. Once I have a working
system, my /oldsys partition becomes my testing partition. Every so often
I have to clean out $HOME/.*, unfortunately, but that's all the cruft I
have to deal with.
On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 9:43 AM, chuck elliot <chuck.ell...@blueyonder.co.uk
> wrote:
> Ditto re. Gnome 3. I avoided upgrading several Fedora 14
> installations until Fedora 17 in order to avoid it. I have resolved
> things by moving to XFCE, to which it was easy to adapt and with which I
> am now perfectly comfortable. The broken stuff is frustrating but there
> are usually work-arounds and there is a lot of choice and freedom you
> would not get with M$...
>
> CF.
>
>
> On Mon, 2012-08-27 at 10:25 -0400, Thomas Sattler wrote:
> > Michael,
> >
> >
> > I feel your pain with respect to GNOME. It is hideous, awful,
> > disgusting, and all that stuff. I always preferred GNOME to KDE, but
> > now they are both on the same level of awfulness.
> >
> >
> > Thankfully, though, they are not the only solutions. If you like
> > Ubuntu, there is a distro that is based on Ubuntu called Linux Mint,
> > and I have moved from Fedora to Mint. I use the Cinnamon desktop, and
> > while I like the original GNOME better than Cinnamon, Cinnamon is a
> > big improvement over the new GNOME (Actually the command line is a big
> > improvement over the new GNOME). Go to linuxmint.com for details.
> >
> >
> > There is also LXDE, which is available at LXDE.org. That's another
> > alternative.
> >
> >
> > --Tom
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 10:08 AM, D. Michael McIntyre
> > <michael.mcint...@rosegardenmusic.com> wrote:
> > I'm writing from GMail in a web browser. I hate using a web
> > browser
> > for email, and have been using KMail for over 10 years. I
> > love KMail.
> >
> > So somewhere after midnight I got the upgrade notification
> > thing from
> > my running Kubuntu 10.04 LTS that 12.04.1 was available.
> > Interesting.
> > That's the first time in years I've actually gotten one of
> > those
> > notifications.
> >
> > I decided to burn some hours fooling around, and give it a
> > go. How
> > much breakage could there be?
> >
> > The clicky link thing failed immediately with error code 1,
> > but no
> > matter. I googled it, and figured out I should run some sudo
> > thing
> > from the command line.
> >
> > That failed about five times in a row, with several minutes
> > between
> > each iteration, because I had a lot of trouble freeing
> > sufficient
> > space on /var, but it did eventually get me there without any
> > additional issues.
> >
> > I was pretty impressed that it replaced several thousand
> > packages
> > without giving me the sense that anything too awful was going
> > to get
> > broken. My old installation was, well, old, and full of
> > random little
> > cruft nuggets.
> >
> > So that was around 0400 when it first booted, and here it is
> > around
> > 1000 by now, and I'm posting this from my shiny new GNOME
> > Classic
> > desktop. I took one look at the non-classic GNOME and could
> > scarcely
> > decipher the completely mutilated train wreck of a thing it
> > called a
> > desktop, so I tried the classic version instead, and it
> > looks...
> > Well, identical. They're both just spectacularly awful. I
> > can't
> > imagine why anybody would use this hideous piece of shit for
> > more time
> > than it took to find the logout button.
> >
> > Oh, and every single word I type is in red, because the
> > language stuff
> > apparently got screwed up in all this too.
> >
> > As for KDE? Forget about KDE. Hours of googling errors
> > later, I
> > finally gave up and installed GNOME, which is completely
> > unusable, but
> > at least it doesn't fail instantly with a cryptic error for
> > which
> > there is no solution in all of google space.
> >
> > There are many references to the lnusertemp thingie not
> > working, going
> > back for years and years, but not a single hint or tip
> > contained in a
> > single one of them was useful. Not unless you consider it
> > progress
> > that I graduated from an instant failure to X11 coming up in a
> > black
> > screen with an endless stream of meaningless errors on the
> > console
> > anyway.
> >
> > I've been doing my bit to make all of this better for 10 years
> > now,
> > and it's extremely depressing to see that everything is just
> > as bad,
> > if not worse, than it was the first time I tried Linux 11
> > years ago.
> > This is progress? This is a completely and hopelessly broken
> > train
> > wreck.
> >
> > I guess I have to figure out how to use the GNOME crap to
> > download and
> > burn an ISO and do a clean install. Maybe that will work.
> >
> > My computer had been up for almost 18 months before I decided
> > to try
> > upgrading it. You'd think I would have learned that for every
> > stable
> > thing in Linux there are 50,000 hopeless train wrecks in
> > between.
> >
> > I tire of this so-called progress.
> >
> >
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