marjaerwin

Any advice here?

It has to be functional. Right now I'm running Gnome 2/Classic in 11.04. And it's actually pretty good, but I'm sick of the emphasis on Unity, which is crap, and Gnome 3, which claims the same new bugs that make Unity such crap. And that's not to mention how they tried to push the broken scrollbars on us.

Anything which is visible-on-mouseover is unreliable. And if the idea is to save screen space, you don't save screen space by creating an invisible feature which users need to avoid. Anything which relies on Nautilus to find files is untrustworthy. Nautilus only gives filenames, not file locations, and I often have different files with similar names in different folders. Unless I know the location, I can't use the search.

One of the more useful features in Gnome 2 was the dock, which simply lists all open application windows and ebables users to switch between windows. It is easy-to-use. And while Unity and Gnome 3 use Mac-style docks, they only allow users to switch between applications; it doesn't help users switch between multiple windows using the same application. If you need to compare two LibreOffice drawings, it's easy in Gnome 2, and significantly harder in Unity.

I'm thinking of switching back to 10.10 and just keeping an older Ubuntu system. I'd have to reinstall some patches and stuff.

P.S. Also, it needs half-decent support. Most Linux support sites are way too technical, and the Ubuntu fora are overrun with condescending Unity-users who go out of their way to insult other members, and the forum staff tolerates the insults while burying or banning any responses. And it ought to have a half-decent futer. The Ubuntu developers seem hell-bent on forcing Unity on us all. Now back to repairing that mouse...

1. Hardware support can be a problem. Right now I'm using Ubuntu on a previously-used laptop; the touchpad company won't release their specs, or the source code for the Windows drivers, and the current Linux drivers cannot disable tap-to-click-go-haywire.

2. Unity. It has some improvements over Gnome, but it has many more bugs than Gnome. It's harder to open specific applications or switch between applications. It relies on a side pane which can get in the way or get stuck. In this case, I'd suggest sticking with Gnome unless they solve the issues with Unity.

3. Language support is a farce. Each keyboard layout is pretty limited, lacking important letters like þ or ... damn, can't even use the compose key to type ƕ, had to search through multiple character sets in another application. Only four keyboard layouts can be enabled. And I end up with one character-insertion application, character map, for certain scripts and another, kchar, for symbols like ♀.