Time to change the penguin!

For the past few years I’ve been running Ubuntu as my everyday OS of choice when not Gaming. And I became quite a fan, I still am! And was looking forward to the latest release 11.04 Natty Narwall with the new user interface Unity. I was excited, here Connonical (the organization behind Ubuntu) had created a new UI that seems to be made for touch screens from day one (even though its a re-engineered UI from the netbook edition). Yet after trying to use it for 2 day’s I became incredibly frustrated with it as thing’s didn’t work the way I expected. So I put this down to me not “getting” the way it work’s. but then after watching the Linux Action Show I saw that I wasn’t the only one, I held hope that I might be able to make it work the way I wanted but there are no options.

Ubuntu Logo

Something new

So I’ve got two choices

1. Go back to Ubuntu 10.10 or 11.04 in classic mode.
2. Download and try a new distribution.

For this I didn’t want to download loads of DVD ISOs and spend age’s sifting through the ok to find the good.

So I narrowed my choices down to two, openSUSE and Linux Mint. I had used openSUSE year’s ago (version 7 I think) and found it easy and well built. And Linux Mint had always been touted as Ubuntu/Debian based and just as easy to use. so I though these are most likely the better distros for me to try.

openSUSE logo

Testing times ahead

What I plan to do is install openSUSE 11.4 first and try living with it for a month then installing Mint and living with that and at the end I’ll see what distro I will use till Ubuntu make Unity better or until I feel I need to change again.

Although that might be tough since Gnome 2 is now reaching the end of its life and I am not a fan of KDE at all. So I might have to learn to love Unity (I don’t hate it) or wait and see what Gnome 3 offers.

Mint logo

So I will post new article to update with my findings, I’m not doing any special tests just trying to do what I would normally do in an OS. If I cant do these things then I will move on to something else.