The Sweet Spot: How I Gave Up On Gnome3/KDE and Ran Back To Linux Mint 10

It kind of funny that I started using Linux in the late 90's when there were few options and now we have loads of them. I've tried Unity and it would be awesome for a tablet but it doesn't feel right for my desktop. I was a big KDE3 fan but KDE4 just isn't do it for me. Gnome shell I think will be killer in a few short years but right now it is merely showing its budding potential.

Linux Mint 10(Maverick) is my sweet spot. I keep returning to it like a guy who ran off an awesome chic because there are too many options out there. Well I'm back for good. I'll stay here for the next couple of years. If I find an awesome ubuntu tablet things might change but the sweet spot is always there for me. It runs perfectly and no hardware issues.

What is the Linux sweet spot for you?

 

Different machines different sweet spots, LTS on desktop, Unity on laptops, LXDE on netbooks.

 

^ Mine (11.10)

 

It is probably Ubuntu 10.04 or Centos 6.
Mrk

 

i am still on linux mint 10 but planning to switch to next mint when it ends or by that time i hope it mature more enough to use as day to day desktop alternative.

as per my default desktop i use scientific linux

linux mint dvd version is buggy and slow dont know what causing it mate or what else i feel cd version more better than dvd one at least on my pc 32 bit cd version .........is fast and very stable. but still i give it more time as i am pretty happy with mint 10

 

Another vote Ubuntu 10.04

Cheers, Nick

 

PCLinuxOS 2007, IMO it was the best, fastest, easy to use, everything worked distro. Linux desktop has gone down hill ever since.

 

Yep, truely a fantastic distro. That and ubuntu 8.04 were both awesome. Alas I can't use them any longer so the current sweet spot would be ubuntu 10.04 or debian squeeze.

 

Oh currant ? hehe

Ubuntu 11.10 and Mint 12 are working fine

 

Lucid on my desktop, laptop and netbook. Maybe try out pinhead possum, when it's a couple months old, after most of the bugs are shaken out.
I guess 12.04 is supposed to be a 5 year stint instead of the usual 3 years for LTS. I hope it will be a good one.

 

Lucid is my sweet spot. I'll keep using it to the bitter end (April 2013... ), I suppose. After that...I just don't know as of right now.

I've tried Mint's Mate Desktop Environment for the past couple of days and to be honest it's not half bad. It's a dead ringer for Gnome 2.32. It even has caja-scripts (the equivalent of nautilus-scripts) and mateconftools-2 (gconftools-2...for my wallpaper-changer script). It's still buggy though for my volume control tray icon would be there one boot-up but gone the next. Also, for some reason, Mate would cause the fan on my laptop to run on high speed all the time while using Cairo Dock. This doesn't happen on Lucid, nor any other distro for that matter. Eventually I think Mate will be a welcomed addition for all of us "old-timers" who hate change....

Seriously though, Gnome 3 is coming along quite nicely with all these terrific extensions that are available. I'm sure more will surface as time goes on making it even more usable. You probably noticed I didn't mention Unity. Well, that was on purpose.

Later...