Do you not even have a desktop background (i.e. just a solid color)?

I don't know if it's just me, but GNOME Shell seems to run faster for me on my netbook than even the Compiz-based Unity. However, at least Unity still runs decently now for me (because it isn't based on Mutter anymore).

Unity 11.04 + Custom desktop background image that I took with my cell phone today at a wilderness park in my area:



I installed Ubuntu again because I replaced Debian on one of my USB drives with Fedora Rawhide and booted the Rawhide image. I formatted my netbook's SSD thinking that I could unsquashfs to it, but that didn't work either, so I decided to reinstall Ubuntu as a temporary system until that Fedora installer bug is fixed.

What I have decided to do is install Fedora 14 and preupgrade to Rawhide.

You could just install from one of the nightly composes - less messing around upgrading.

I usually use Netbootcd on usb to install Rawhide
http://netbootcd.tuxfamily.org/

Well, I can boot from the nightly composes, but not install. There is a bug in the nightly composes that causes the installer to fail to start. But no worries. I was able to work around it by installing F14 and then:

just finished my hippy theme :3

desktop
http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/420/openbox24.png
terminal theme
http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/8340/openbox21.png
window and icon theme
http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/8301/openbox22.png

Updated my taskbar...the GTK/Emerald themes are the same, but I took the liberty to change the Xfce menu button/icon to something a little more distinguishing.

My final Fedora Rawhide netbook (basically GNOME 2.91 with the default GNOME 3 background):

[QUOTE=Kenny_Strawn;4244112]My final Fedora Rawhide netbook (basically GNOME 2.91 with the default GNOME 3 background):

Final? That's the most conservative background you've ever posted.

Alright, fine. Well I was having package management problems (which I find to be serious problems in my case), and since Ubuntu Natty has less of them, I just reinstalled it.

The problem was that there were dependency problems, which Debian and Fedora seem to every so often have. Ubuntu is having less and less of these lately (as in Ubuntu's version of APT seems to "just work" when it comes to resolving dependencies) and Rawhide from what I've read is full of them. I also, from my hands-on experience, experienced great dependency headaches when working with LMDE. There was one 'apt-get dist-upgrade' that I canceled. What it did was attempt to *remove* half the packages on my system as part of the upgrade! Thank God I was able to say 'no' to that upgrade that could have broken my desktop as well as most of the high levels of my system.

Rawhide has been known to eat babies and totally bork one's setup. The Fedora folks do warn of this, but some of us use it anyway. In my case, I always keep at least one working distro on my hard drive as a backup, and have at least one relatively recent known-to-work live CD or USB stick ready to go. Usually, when Rawhide wants to remove critical system components or apps, I start upgrading, rpm-by-rpm, only those rpms that will upgrade without wiping (or knowingly leave unbootable) out my whole OS. Right now, on my desktop PC, Rawhide is fully updated, but Ubuntu pre-11.04 has issues with the nouveau driver and with compiz.

Well, yeah, after upgrading, I noticed that Unity would not start. There was a workaround, however, to downgrade libglew1.5 and libglewmx1.5 to their Maverick instead of Natty versions.

And here is my Natty desktop after implementing that workaround:







It features a custom wallpaper taken of a plant native to California at Whiting Ranch wilderness park.