Kde to Gnome to Kde. Full circle. What happened to the Gnome I loved?
 

For starters. Sorry for the long rant.

I've been a linux user since about 2000. Started with Kde and used it, mostly, until they went to 4. Switched to gnome and loved it. Everything worked and was configured to my liking.

Now, I have used all of the other window managers. I like Lxde, Xfce, and Jwm. They have strong suits but they all fail in some respect for me. They might be ok if they had decent file managers. Thunar and Pcfman fall short compared to Nautilus.

So. In the last few days I have been attempting to update computers to the new buntu 12.04. I have tried Unity, Fallback, Gnome 3, Cinnaman, and Mate. I have tried a variety of buntu offsprings including Mint, Snow , Luninux, Zorin, Os4, Ultimate, Bodhi, etc. They all fail for various reasons including crashes, bugs, instability. I do respect the efforts of Mint, Snow, Zorin, and Luninux in regards to trying to make Gnome 3 usable.

Pure Unity and Gnome 3 are completely useless to me. They may be fine for tablets and netbooks but not regular monitors.

My last resort was to try Kde. What a pleasant surprise after mucking around with the others for days.

Btw, I settled for Mint kde. At least they have java, flash, codecs included in the download. My only complaint was the crappy fonts I had to fix. I'm loving Dolphin.

Before everyone starts telling me to use Slackware, Gentoo, Fedora, etc., I do not have time or bandwidth to experiment.

Goodbye Gnome. It was a nice relationship for several years.

Huh?

Whatever happened to Gnome? It changed its name to Maté and emigrated to Argentina! I've been wondering what I'll do when Red Hat, and hence CentOS, gets Gnome 3. Then yesterday I read that Maté will be in Fedora 18 or 19: who says there are no happy endings?

FWIW, the Debian team has announced a switch to XFCE as default desktop.

I have no problem getting the cds or dvds. Its the software that is added on afterwards that gets intensive. I can keep a copy of the apt archive from the first install and use the archive in subsequent installs. Not so complicated. Saves a lot of time and needless downloads. That is why buntu is a good candidate with all the respins and easy to find software.

I do have a Chakra cd. Their implementation of Kde is stellar. I would be tempted to switch if I knew I could find everything I need. They are not associated with Arch and maintain their own repository so that turns me off.

I see Snow has just released a Gnome 2 version. It could be the ticket. They did a decent job with cinnamon.

Thanks for everyones' comments.

Yes indeed!

I just started to use xfce and dropped Gnome after several years, although I use CentOS.

But as I heard Debian just made this decision because of the installer image size.
The Gnome 3 would not fit into one CD. ;)

Thanks for the explanation, this indeed makes sense.

May be the main reason, but I also see a different reason. Debian, with its outstanding stability, is a good candidate for being used in corporate environments. IMHO, in such environments a switch from Gnome 2 to XFCE makes more sense than a switch from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 when upgrading the systems. XFCE simply looks more familiar and needs less re-training.

Perhaps by that time Gnome 3 will get tweaked enough from all that criticism before reaching RHEL7. But I have never tried Mate so I can't comment. Hope its good. I also do not like this tablet "trend" because in my opinion that is exactly what it is... a "trend". For tablet users why not just stick to android... You need a big screen for power usage and real stuff.

Gnome 2 is great on CentOS. The only thing that bugs me is the window manager but that has its ups and downs. Kde is also interesting but I find Gnome 2 more productive.