PenGun wrote:The main part of any *nix is the OS. The ability to get it, usually quite easily, to do anything you might want has little to do with the GUI.
For servers yes, but once you want a development PC with OpenOffice, FireFox, IM, IDE, Debugger, multiple terminals, multiple Nautilus windows, gedit, calendar. You soon understand that effective GUI is very important.
This is why Unity is so bad IMHO.
If you're a teen that only lives on facebook/google+/youtube, it's fine, because you don't use GUI at all, but as soon as you have 6+ different apps in your workflow, Unity is done, it's clumsy, and gets in a way.
Even more so, the idea of putting the quick access bar on side of the screen that's over 2000pix wide, with an auto-hide... Every time I can't use an alt+tab, I feel how I have to travel miles with the mouse cursor, wait a second till it appears, scan which icon I need, if it's not stacked. And only then I can switch to a target window.
It's actually easier to do Alt+Tab 10x, which never happens in Windows. I got to admit, I still prefer the taskbar + small icons of W7 over Ubuntu 10.04 with Gnome.
Kde had some issues with font aliasing, and gadgety things were floating up all the time, but kubuntu is probably next thing I'll use if Unity is not stripped from the Ubuntu.
just brew it! wrote:For day-to-day desktop usage, or as a host to run VMs to try out other distros/OSes, it's hard to beat IMO.
One word... TRIM
The only reason why I was considering 11.10 versions. Running natively on an SSD drive would benefit from "discard" feature through fstab.
ultima_trev wrote:You can switch to the classic desktop on the login screen. The small gear icon adjacent to the username gives you interface options, just switch to Ubuntu 2D to revert to metacity rather than Unity.
Not in 11.10...