Monday, July 11, 2011

Follow-up on 11.04

Well, it's been quite some time now using Ubuntu 11.04. What are my thoughts of using the Unity interface?

Let's put it this way - I've switched back to Ubuntu Classic and have almost forgotten about Unity. Just didn't enjoy it. It was especially clunky when running two screens, with the icon bar down the left side of the screen. That icon bar had a name, didn't it? I've forgotten, it's been pushed out of my memory.

In recent weeks, I've tried out CrunchBang Linux on the laptop. It's a minimal, stripped-down distro based on Debian. It's nice and quick on that, and I'm quite warming to the way the Openbox window manager does things. Being a lightweight distro, there are things that aren't in an Ubuntu install, like a suspend function. I have to do some research into enabling that - whether something has to be installed or not.

Not sure on whether I would put it on the desktop yet. For one, it is based on a fairly old 2.6.32 kernel, that doesn't fully support the solid-state drives' TRIM command. There is an experimental kernel that is an option that comes up when you first install - the "cb-welcome" script is excellent, asking whether to install various commonly-used programs.

One other thing is whether DigiKam would install properly. I have it installed, grudgingly, on this Ubuntu system because it's the next best thing to forking out big bucks on Bibble or Adobe Lightroom. Grudgingly, because it's a KDE program, a buttload of extra KDE-related cruft is installed along with it. I don't want to clog up a nice, fast Crunchbang install with that.

We'll see.