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pizza-is-good
October 20th, 2011, 10:44 PM
I'm thinking of installing 11.10 on my Latitude E6400 to give gnome shell a try. I have been running 10.04 LTS 64 bit since it came out.

My few questions are:

-Is 11.10 as solidly built as 10.04? I can handle some bugs and having to put in some cli work, that is not a problem, but I don't want to do much.

-64bit or 32? It seems that 64 has become mainstream in my absence from constant upgrade world. When I did 64 on 10.04 I had to do some very interesting work to make the install fully functional. Drivers for nVidia cards were not fully up to speed then as they were for 32. Has this improved?

-How well does Gnome Shell run? I hear the install for it is easy through the software center. How much better is it than Gnome 2? Now, I am a 'traditional' Ubuntu guy, Unity is not for me. Just saying that so nobody wastes time trying to convince me. I want Gnome 3, no questions asked...

-I hear synaptic is gone... Is it installable? and is apt still the program manager? How is the software center? In 10.04 it almost matched Synaptic, but not quite.

If anyone else has some other advice about going from 10.04 to 11.10, kindly share. I'm not looking for a perfect out of the box experience, but close to it would be appreciated ;). Any tweaks to Shell recommended?

Thanks!

~pizza

searchfgold6789
October 21st, 2011, 12:20 AM
-Is 11.10 as solidly built as 10.04? I can handle some bugs and having to put in some cli work, that is not a problem, but I don't want to do much.It's pretty solid, I've tried it, but if you're using a typical Desktop PC, Unity will positively kill your productivity.


-64bit or 32? It seems that 64 has become mainstream in my absence from constant upgrade world. When I did 64 on 10.04 I had to do some very interesting work to make the install fully functional. Drivers for nVidia cards were not fully up to speed then as they were for 32. Has this improved?Yup, you should be OK with that.


-How well does Gnome Shell run? I hear the install for it is easy through the software center. How much better is it than Gnome 2? Now, I am a 'traditional' Ubuntu guy, Unity is not for me. Just saying that so nobody wastes time trying to convince me. I want Gnome 3, no questions asked...An embarrassingly large percentage of Ubuntu users have the same feelings. You can check this (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1859961) out to get what you want.


-I hear synaptic is gone... Is it installable? and is apt still the program manager? How is the software center? In 10.04 it almost matched Synaptic, but not quite.
Synaptic is available and very usable. APT is as apt as ever and still the default package manager.


Other tips I may have:


Use Compiz, it's awesome - no longer just eye candy but an actual productivity increaser.
You may want to stick with LTS until the user experience rating goes up a bit.
Do a backup beforehand in case you get Metacity crashes or something.
Do a complete reinstall as opposed to an upgrade.
Recycle.
Believe in Jesus. :KS

- search
P.S. Perhaps irrelevant: Kubuntu isn't very solid atm.

pizza-is-good
October 21st, 2011, 12:36 AM
Thank you for the reply. I am actually Live Booted onto 11.10 right now. I must say that Unity now as opposed to 11.04 is much improved. Though having to go through endless menus or typing the name of the application to find something is not what I want to do day to day. If I ever get a tablet, Unity will be what I put in after I root it, as it seems perfect for a tablet. In the mean time, I don't like to use the mouse so much...

Yeah, the usual upgrade advice :) I dual boot with 7. My guess is that the installation will take care of GRUB as always, right? Compiz on Gnome Shell I assume?

Thank you for advice on Kubuntu. I've never been much of a KDE guy though I thought of giving it a try before I knew Gnome 3 was a possibility. Never much for eye candy either, I liked Human :p, but Compiz is nice.

searchfgold6789
October 22nd, 2011, 03:27 AM
I dual boot with 7. My guess is that the installation will take care of GRUB as always, right? Compiz on Gnome Shell I assume? Yup, Grub will automatically be updated nd will include Win 7 as a boot option.
+1 for installing 11.04+ on tablets. The trend nowadays seems to be emulating actual physical human movements on the desktop and integrating human body-like movments into the user experience. You should check out Windows 8 developer Preview, it's really scary :P.
Happy to help,
- search