"Do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?"

I don't know, the youth nowadays, they just want to have everything ready:)

On a serious note, I don't know where you took it from. I haven't noticed people recommending any of those distros for newbies (at least not here on LQ).
Actually it wouldn't be a bad idea. If someone made an effort to install/configure Gentoo, etc., they would have learnt enough to install/use/troubleshoot any distro.

As opposed to newbies simply stopping when an update goes bad and Xorg won't start, and they have no clue what to do. Or when dependency management fails and you get a reciprocal dependency.

Yup...I already see some Ubuntu users use ye olde Windows fix-it-all: format the hard-drive and reinstall.
I can't always blame them really...some "user friendly" distros have so many in-house modifications and layers of crap hiding the system from the user that it's hard to know where to start to fix a difficult problem.

That's probably why Slackware will still be here when Ubuntu has withered and died.

Well now I wouldn't say it has withered and died (yet). It is still here, the question is whether anybody will be using Ubuntu in the long term?

Exactly why I don't agree with old people either. Not *all* 17-year-olds are bad as I have said already (speaking of myself).

Kenny, if only you could take posts less seriously...:)

BTW, I hope you don't call me old as I still belong to the youth. I'm only twice your age, LOL

You're only as old as you feel they say... Owww, my-back! ... :p

Okay, sorry. My parents are what you would consider old, and even then, if you get too old you're just as bad as some of the youth when it comes to computer illiteracy.

Recently I had a cup of coffee with an 85-year-old chap. When he was standing up, he said, "Oww, my back... I think I'm getting old." I really loved his sense of humour.

Okay, can we get back on topic, *PLEASE*?! I disagree with this article, because I do know that Unity can be forked into different form factors, but I also like GNOME Shell because it doesn't have windows maximized by default. Both of them have their quirks as well (in GS a single menu dictates the whole experience, even to switch windows or workspaces, while in Unity you get a look and feel like a cross between iOS and Mac OS X) and in my opinion it's the average "whichever suits you best".

Gnome is too old-fashioned, and the default top and bottom panels are so prehistoric i feel pity (and more when i see it on 16:9 screens. I remember proud window$ users with 4-5 toolbars on their IE, and 7cm to see the web).
KDE is a "i take the worst of windo$ and mac". Also counter-productive because working with it makes work harder and slower. No need to troll around, the K menu (K for Katastrophic) suffice to prove it.
Gnome wins vs KDE (and Xfce wins vs Gnome, but it's another story).

I hope they will make a good new desktop config. Not too revolutionary/hype/overhype. Ubuntu gains everyday more and more M$ users so it's not time to slow down the process with an un-understandable/stupid desktop, like the Ubuntu netbook edition is.

If the noob wants to learn, then i recommend Slackware. Nothing else.
If he doesn't, Ubuntu is the best choice. But as H_TeXMeX_H said, when problems occurs, it's simply impossible to repair anything. The noob is dead.

GNOME 2.x, I agree, is *very* prehistoric and looks like it just came out of the 1990's. However, the GNOME 3.0 Shell promises to change that.

This article is about the fact that Ubuntu will use its own desktop shell (Unity) instead of the GNOME shell in the Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11.04). Personally, I think it's somewhat of a bad idea, but in my opinion both Unity and GNOME Shell have the same quality.

Rumor has it that DRM will be a part of the new interface. If that is true, ubuntu should be disowned from the community.

It may also be a fish story, but now there are rumors of ubuntu replacing the kernel also with a python based system.

m$ = Micro$oft = Mark $huttleworth.

I've never used Unity, so I don't know the pros and cons about it.

I think Unity is a test. And Canonical would decide the fate of Unity
depending on the reactions and reviews it gets from linux users and
online article writers.

Even if Unity gets a positive vote, Canonical should still offer a GNOME 3.0
version as well.

Since Ubuntu has a 'U', this could now be known as the Unity edition.
And if they decide to offer the GNOME 3.0 version, it can be called Gubuntu.

https://launchpad.net/pycorn

This has been in concept for a *very* long time (ever since I even *knew* about Linux) and it still hasn't replaced the Linux kernel in Ubuntu.

And even then, Python is interpreted and *cannot* be used to create a kernel unless you somehow integrate the Python interpreter into GRUB. And even then, it would be *very* slow.