I think we are kind of in a transition period here (again)... Ubuntu, for me, was getting to be too much work to make it what I want. They turned off so many things, ctrl-alt-backspace being one of the first. I really hate the Unity menu, although it is much like Gnome-shell...which I really like. <div>
<br></div><div>I had to just ditch Ubuntu, going to Mint for me is a good transition stage as it's based on Ubuntu...I will probably end up at Debian or maybe go way out to Arch. I may even have to completely switch to Fedora, or CentOS. I guess my point for switching is that I want to run Linux, and not a distro that is competing with another OS. At the same time I'm really rooting for Ubuntu (and others) to keep it up, because they have come quite far in taking a piece of the desktop OS market and has really helped to put Linux on the map as a viable desktop OS. </div>
<div><br></div><div>To answer your question (with my opinion)..I think the Mint and Cinnamon desktops have staying power. Actually they are just schema and extensions for Gnome 3 (AFAIK), but Mint has been around for quite a while now and they don't seem to be going anywhere. Plus the Mint/Cinnamon are going to be carried on by others in some form/name. If you have the hardware (mostly a good video card supporting 3d/2d acceleration) then give gnome3 a shot (live-cd will tell, virtual machine...not so much without a lot of fuss because of 3d accel, etc.). The Mint distro has a couple gnome-shell extensions that help bring it back to what we were used to in gnome-2...but with all the new features of gnome-3. They did a great job if you ask me.<div>
<br></div><div>Here is my advice, to myself and all of us who are being 'put out' by these changes. Move our /home folder to a separate partition, and be ready to re-install whenever we feel like it :)<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 3:42 PM, BrianO'Keefe <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:okeefe@cybermesa.com">okeefe@cybermesa.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<u></u>
<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
I understand the upgrade distinction and my issue is that unless I
upgrade my distro I will get left behind in support and the kernel
as more apps, etc. are tailored to the newer versions of packages.
It seems though that there are efforts to mitigate the Unity debacle
with Mint and Cinnamon desktops but will they have staying power and
will Ubuntu get it's act together and hear our screams?<div class="im"><br>
<br>
On 01/24/2012 10:45 AM, Jason Schaefer wrote:
</div><div><div class="h5"><blockquote type="cite">
<pre>On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 8:44 PM, BrianO'Keefe <a href="mailto:okeefe@cybermesa.com" target="_blank"><okeefe@cybermesa.com></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>Thanks Rob,
I have run apt-get update but have read that your suggestion does a partial
upgrade and that can cause issues. Is that correct? I'll do some more
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre>Hi Brian
I've lost touch with the ubuntu releases but I think that your version
of 10.10 doesn't have gnome unity. If you do a dist-upgrade it will
only upgrade the 10.10 distribution and not bring in anything outside
of it. As Rob pointed out, it won't upgrade your distribution to 11.10
(or whichever) UNLESS you change your /etc/apt/sources.list or
equivalent to include a newer distribution. Perhaps the "dist" in
dist-upgrade is misleading... dist-upgrade is the appropriate way to
do a "full" upgrade either standing in your current distro or to a new
one.
If you want to be more conservative you could use "apt-get upgrade".
This is less aggressive in its updates and will not add or remove
packages to facilitate a full upgrade.
Also, "apt-get update" doesn't actually update packages, it only tells
the system the latest updates available from the /etc/apt/* repository
lists.
If you are worried, go ahead and send us the output of "apt-get dist-upgrade".
Jason
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</blockquote>
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