hey guys

i just upgraded to ubuntu 11.04. now panels disappeared. everything looks too much like mac, it's way too confusing for me. is there a way to restore panels like they were in the previous versions?

nevermind i already switched to fedora

I prefer Debian but Fedora is a good choice.

For anyone more interested than you and I, yes you can "fall back" to the panel style desktop.

On the bottom panel of the log in page you need to change the session to "Classic Desktop" before hitting enter.

As of 11.10 this will not be an option. Unity love it or leave. I left.

Ubuntu and all other distros, Fedora, Debian etc, will have to do something different as Gnome3 is coming and the default Desktop will be Gnome Shell. The panels will be supported in a limited fashion by Gnome3, at least for a little while.

GS does not blow my skirt up but it is certainly more usable than Unity.

I preparation for the demise of the panels I would suggest taking a fresh look at Xfce and Lxde.

I also think that some group will, at least in the short run, fork the panel style Gnome. I hope so anyway.

I have been using Lubuntu with LXDE since 10.10 came out. It is fast and light just like Ubuntu was back in the days of Breezy 5.04 and Dapper 6.06.
Lubuntu is also free of that resource hogging scourge that is pulseaudio.
The apps that are included with Lubuntu are lightweight stuff like abiword, audacious (aqualung was included with 10.10 and is even lighter than audacious), gnome mplayer, and xfburn.
Lubuntu 11.04 is just as good as 10.10 so far for me.

EDIT: Some searching has revealed that Aqualung is not really lighter on your computer's resources than Audacious. See this from the Lubuntu mailing lists:
https://lists.launchpad.net/lubuntu-.../msg02886.html
Also, as it says there, Audacious is more actively maintained than Aqualung.
Both Aqualung and Audacious are great lightweight music players though. As of this writing, you really can't go wrong with either one.

I just finished installing the upgrade, and find Unity a poor choice for my desktop. Switched back to Gnome, but seeing it will be gone as of 11.10 I'm probably going to migrate to another distro. Might take a look at Slackware, but I doubt that will be my choice as KDE isn't exactly my cup o' tea, although XFCE might be suitable. I used Slackware for several years, and found it to be a solid distro, but it can also be a PITA too (as I suppose they all are at one point or another).

I don't understand the concept behind adding more mouse clicks to the process of finding applications. Clicking a menu, then moving the mouse over selections and automagically seeing menus expand seems to be a reasonable solution. For the amount of time I spent navigating around in Unity, what was a fairly straightforward process now involves digging through several selections and menus. That, and the suggested downloads in every panel is fairly annoying, too. I imagine that can be removed easily enough, and is hardly a deal breaker. There are enough things that add up as negatives in Unity for me to start considering options.

Guess I'll have to fire up some virtual machines and run through the list of possible candidates. I already have a Slackware VM, but was thinking Solaris and FreeBSD are possible candidates too. I have OpenBSD installed on a laptop, but that might be a bit of a stretch for my main desktop.

Eh, change is hardly a bad thing. Ubuntu worked well enough over the last few years for me, but it might be time to move on.

I've got a desktop that runs Ubuntu, and I tried out the Unity interface. Liked the sidebar thing, thought it looked cool, but other than that the interface leaves much to be desired. Second partition on that drive will be getting something different. Haven't decided what yet. I like Gnome well enough (as it is now) and that pc can handle the shinies, but I am kinda partial to the panels. I am open to just about any distro, so I'm going to be spending some time looking around at what's on offer, now that I've found the right low-resource usage distro for my old laptop, I can look around at the shinier options.... or I could stick with the same system and install a fancier interface... ah, the options! I love it!

The new look has irritated me too. But no need to switch to another distro, Ubuntu still rocks ! You can switch to old Gnome look in login screen, selecting "Ubuntu Classic" from the menu located underside, and everything should work as it was.

Everyone is going to loose the panels sooner or later. They are not in the long term plan by Gnome. Like I said before I think someone will fork Gnome to continue panel development but there is no surity about that at all.

Ubuntu will not be offering the panel fall back in 11.10. Gnome desktop will be in the repos so you could do a netboot install and leave the bloated Ubuntu desktop out and that would do for 11.10.

11.10 is also, I think, going to be changing away from compiz as the Window Manager. While I think this is a good idea it is going to make 11.10 testing probably rather exciting and I suspect a rather buggy release. We should know more about that when the UDS gets over.

What about the LTS (12.04)? Gnome3 will be full blown by then and while I think that Gnome Shell is better than Unity it really does not blow my skirt up.

I like Unity. I detest the Gnome 3 shell.

I find Unity clean and consistent. Easy to work with. Unity is the reason I use Ubuntu now.

You don't have to install KDE with Slackware. Deselect it during install. The installer also has options to install xfce, blackbox, fvwm and twm.

Gnome Slack Build still has Gnome 2.32. They even provide a simple script to download and install it.

But Gnome2's days are numbered, which is too bad. I like Gnome2 a lot.

Have a look at Salix: Slackware with added user-friendly tools and extra software. The contents of the Slackware repository are used unchanged, so you keep the famous stability. And the standard desktop is Xfce.

I've never seen the point of any mouse clicks. I use super key shortcuts for the common applications, and start the menu with Alt-F1 for the rare ones.

I've read many posts which talk about switching to classic mode, as if it's real easy and it probably is for some people. I've been messing with this for about a week now. On my computer there is no log out option and there is no classic option appearing in the log in Screen. The log in screen in Ubuntu appears to behave differently on some peoples computers. Here's how I figured out how to log in as classic mode.

1. Press Alt + F2 and enter the following.
gnome-session-save --logout-dialog

2. The log out window should pop up. Then Log out.
3. In oder to get the options on my computer to show up, I have to hit enter a few times. So hit enter a couple of times. Then suddenly the options appear in the bottom panel.

4. Select Classic mode.
5. Then log back in.

Every thing should be there, just as it was in the old Ubuntu, two panels, system menus, and the ability to add applets to the panels and every thing you used to have. I assure you it's all there, it's just hard to figure out how to switch to it.

When your login screen comes up there are no options on the bottom panel. This is as it should be.

When you click with your mouse on the login box or hit enter to activate the password box the bottom panel should have options on it. If this is not the case there is a bug or, at least, a problem with your gdm installation.

At that time there should be a session option box in the center right of that bottom panel where you can select your desktop session. This is how you sellect KDE, Xfce or Lxde (or any other) desktop environments at login if you have them installed.

Kdm, gdm, ldm and as far as I know all such managers have this option as it is built into the kernel. Have never seen a Linux distro that did not have those options.

Now someone can jump in and correct me if I am just completely off the beam.

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