OStatic

by Forensic Penguin2 on Nov. 04, 2011

Now this just makes sense. Why hasn't anyone thought of it before.

by brett on Nov. 04, 2011

This is good news, I am anxious to see how this turns out. Quite possibly Linux Mint may knock Ubuntu off the throne if this is implemented well. And given the track record of Linux Mint it likely will be. With that said; Elementary OS is another one I have my eye on. I have read that they also plan some tweaks to Gnome Shell. Not that Gnome Shell is entirely bad as is though. However, when I used it I felt like I wasn't in as much control over my DE as I would have liked. Also it felt as if sometimes Gnome Shell let you paint yourself into a corner requiring too many extra mouse clicks to back your way out (yes, I know about the keyboard shortcuts but that is not for everybody.). Adding a dock seemed to alleviate this somewhat, but imho that solution is less than ideal.

by Caraibes on Nov. 05, 2011

RHEL6 clones are today's best option...

I totally switched to Scientific Linux 6, with Gnome 2.28. I am very happy, it is rock solid, with a very small footprint. It is actually much lighter than Xubuntu, about the same system requirements as Fluxbox in Ubuntu... I boot into Gnome 2.x within 140 megs of ram...

I too thought I could deal with Xfce 4.8 as my main desktop, in replacement of Gnome 2, but it still doesn't feel like the original...

I have always disliked KDE, so it is simply not an option...

Gnome 2 is simply the best out there...

For the Deb guys, there is still Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (I ran it for more than a year...), or Debian 6... But changes are coming your way...

RHEL clones are your only hope so far... Either CentOS or Scientific Linux... Very good...

This is Linux for grown-ups !!!!!

by badwolf9 on Nov. 06, 2011

This is a very interesting path that Clem and the team have chosen. I think there will be many, many people who will watch it with great interest. As a long time Mint user I got used to Gnome 2 but can see many of the possibilities now with Gnome 3 (testing it out on Ubuntu 11.10, Arch and OpenSuSE 12.1). The use of extensions was something that piqued my interest, certainly when compared to Unity, and the extension (!) of this concept that Mint is proposing will almost certainly appeal to a very wide audience.

As Linux is all about choice, I see this as a great announcement.

by Coffee on Nov. 07, 2011

> However, distributions have to move on.

... do they? What does the tired, old and vacuous "move on" argument mean in this context? Do applications, desktop environments and whole distributions really have to be re-designed from scratch each couple of years just for the heck of it? I don't think so. In my opinion careful maintenance, functional improvements, bug squishing and security fixes would be enough in cases that have been more or less feature-complete since years. Such an approach would have spared us the butterfly-to-caterpillar metamorphosis of the Gnome desktop.

> No matter where developers lead us, we must follow.

... no, we don't. There's plenty of choice and we jump ship when developers come up with something unacceptable. This is what seems to be happening to Ubuntu, whose erratic and autocratic strategy changes have been alienating users for some time. Many are now discovering that there are attractive alternatives like Linux Mint where the "community" still counts for something and user input is valued and taken seriously.

by Kurt Weirich on Nov. 07, 2011

The reason for me to change from Ubuntu to Linux Mint is Gnome 2!!

by brett on Nov. 08, 2011

I left Ubuntu some time ago, to many regressions for my taste. Often Canonical would fix one bug and break something else in its place. So I Mainly use Fedora now and I really like it. But Scientific Linux is equally nice in my opinion; it's even better than CentOS is some ways. And Unity does seem to make sense on a netbook, however I found Ubuntu 11.10 a bit too sluggish on my Asus 1005ha for my tastes. I also tried Unity on my desktop; for me it was not so much fun to use for everyday things. And running GIMP on top of Unity really sucked, I found GIMP's multiple windows were a nothing short of a pain to navigate under Unity. I still will be watching plain vanilla Gnome Shell though, it does have potential. But for now XFCE seems to be where it's at for me. It's fairly lean, plus I really love being able to access all my apps by simply right clicking on the desktop. I guess only time will tell if Clem's spin on Gnome Shell will finally bring me back to Gnome.