[ltp] How safe is ubuntu 11.10?

[Steven J. Owens]

On Sat, Nov 05, 2011 at 05:53:37PM -0500, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:
> The advice I heard from others is do not upgrade to 11.10, do a clean install.

     I ended up installing the 11.10 as a dual-boot clean install, as I described
in another post, just now.

> I did a clean install of 11.10 on my wife's Dell XPS M1330N (which came with
> Hardy Heron pre-installed).  She wants the newer Flash and other updates, but
> doesn't want anything to change.  Unity lasted 1 1/2 days. She hated the color
> scheme (ORANGE in your face), the UI, that it was different, etc.  I'm working
> on making it as close to Hardy Heron as feasible.

     I have no particular axe to grind with Unity, but gratuitous
change is annoying.  I hear it's much friendlier to new users, but I
was (sadly not) shocked and (all too) appalled to see it was actually
*slower* than 10.4 LTS, even with the newer kernel.  

     Also, there were several minor details that I found annoying and
don't have spare time right now to learn the workarounds for.  The new
way alt-tab works.  The lack of a gnome menu bar applet for
window-selecting.  The menu search feature is definitely nice (how
many times have I installed a new package, then had to go to google or
#ubuntu to ask about where to find the new menu item).  But I hate
*having* to use it instead of going to where I know stuff is. I like
the command shell, but it's a bit silly to reimplement it in the menu
:-).

     I decided to try out one of the lighter-weight UIs, and went with
xubuntu, which runs xfce.  It is trivially easy to install (sudo
aptitude install xubuntu-desktop) and equally trivial to switch back
and forth between it and unity (just select which one you want on the
X login dialog).  It's much snappier, though it could use a little
help in the visual design department.  But ultimately it's about
getting stuff done.

-- 
Steven J. Owens
puff@darksleep.com / (412) 401-8060 cell 
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