Gone back to 10.04!

[Duncan J Murray]

My dearly loved Thinkpad T40 finally bit the dust recently, not because anything went wrong with it, but because a cheap laptop backpack broke it's straps while it was on my back, causing the laptop to hit the ground quite hard, and shearing off the left screen hinge (still works!).

I had been having trouble with the upgrade from 10.04 -> 12.04, which I was using in fallback mode (it suited my way of working with workspaces better than unity, and was a smidgen faster), but found it very slow. It felt like working in treacle. So I thought I'd switch over to Mate - using Linux Mint Mate 13. This was a huge improvement, but it was still a bit slower than 10.04, and there was the odd bug or two (the desktop background frequently completely blacked out) - but nothing show stopping.

Anyway, I have a nice shiny old Thinkpad T60p 14", which I have just finished installing 10.04 on. I figured that there wasn't anything that 12.04 or Mint Maya could do that 10.04 couldn't. I had also considered other possibilities - mainly crunchbang and xubuntu - but the former I thought might have been a bit too fiddly (editing config files for the application menu put me off) and the latter I just couldn't grow to love (really missed the 'places' menu). So I went with 10.04.4. I had to do a lot of repository stuff, but firefox is at least reasonably up to date, and a lot of the other stuff I don't mind being a bit old. I've got PPAs for libreoffice, kupfer and rhythmbox.

I have to say - it is incredible! Very fast, very useable, and I'm very happy. I think next year I will simply continue to use it without updates, and hopefully not run into too many problems. If anyone else is struggling to find something that fills the void for gnome 2, then I would wholeheartedly recommend sticking with 10.04 a bit longer.

PS I know this laptop is substantially faster than my previous laptop (Banias 1.3Ghz versus duocore 2Ghz), and probably 12.04 fallback/unity/gnome3/cinnamon/mate would all run very quick on it, but the thought of those wasted CPU cycles for no gain upsets me!

[aspergerian]

Duncan,

Your thoughts parallel mine. I tried Unity, then its gnome, then Mint, finally have settled on Xubuntu but remain tempted to revert to 10.04, which remains my favorite.

[mamamia88]

Why use something that won't receive updates soon? Why not try mint with mate or xubuntu, or debian? I don't get why you would want to use a 2 year old version of ubuntu when there are better options that are supported

[drawkcab]

Is anyone using 12.04 with MATE?

[Duncan J Murray]

I think there are a lot of people with similar wants as myself at the moment, and I agree that linux mint mate and xubuntu are the equivalent modern distros which would be the sensible option. However, 10.04 is, nonetheless, really excellent - fast, stable, and with a bit of compiz, also looks quite nice.

linux mint mate is also excellent, but there was the odd bug, and it is definetely more resource hungry and slower than 10.04. I'm not sure whether this is to do with mate, or other extra processes running.

xfce/xubuntu I also quite like, but I'm actually a really big fan of the three menus in Gnome 2 - there isn't any way to replicate this behaviour in xfce that I've found (the main problem being the 'places' bit of it).

debian? I suppose why not? Or maybe even LMDE. In the past I've struggled to get debian to work (mainly drivers trouble), and I'm probably not proficient enough to get it working with everything I like to do. LMDE is excellent, but they've recently moved up to Gnome3 as default (I think with Cinnamon), and there currently isn't a MATE version - you have install it after, but certainly this might be the way to go in the future for something fast/reliable etc...

Does it matter that 10.04 will stop being updated next year? I'm still using 10.10 on a USB stick at work, and that seems fine...

D

[Duncan J Murray]

PS I haven't tried 12.04 with MATE, but I figure that you might as well go for linux mint mate rather than faff around with installing mate on 12.04. I also wonder if linux mint mate will be a bit leaner, as it won't have all of the G3/unity baggage with it (maybe that was what was slowing down 12.04 fallback?).

[snowpine]

Why use something that won't receive updates soon? Why not try mint with mate or xubuntu, or debian? I don't get why you would want to use a 2 year old version of ubuntu when there are better options that are supported

Ubuntu 10.04 is comparable in age-of-packages to Debian, Red Hat, and CentOS, which are among the most stable, highly-regarded, and widely-used of distributions. The core packages of 10.04 (kernel and libraries) will be fully supported through April 2015 (although you'll have to do your own updates to the web browser and desktop apps) so I really don't see anything wrong with using or recommending 10.04 for conservative users.

[sudodus]

Now I have moved from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS and from gnome to lxde (Lubuntu plus xubuntu-desktop) on an IBM Thinkpad 41. It is doing quite well (more responsive than vanilla Ubuntu 10.04).

See also http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2088658

[dannyboy79]

I never upgraded, been happily using 10.04.4 on my MythTV/Media server as well as my main Workstation. It's mainly because my tv cards are analog (PVR-350 and PVR-500) and I have been told that MythTV above .23 has a bug with these old analog cards creating zero byte files so that's a no-go for me. I'll stick with 10.04.4/MythTV .23.1+fixes as long as I can. TWC is still transmitting the analog signal over the internet coax line so I get free analog cable stations, from 2 to 99.

I do run 12.04 Gnome Classic 2D on my Sony Vaio laptop though.

[kurt18947]

IME the 12.04 series, be it Lubuntu or Xubuntu is quite stable and fast. Of course I've selected hardware with an eye toward linux compatibility so that may enter into the equation.