Unity Killed My Desktop...Now What?

So as I wrote last year, Unity effectively ended Ubuntu's five-year streak on my personal desktop. I stuck it out with Unity for about eight months and then the fun began...distro shopping! My criteria were:

1. Lean - Although I have a fast machine, software bloat is one of the reasons I abandoned the M$ ship.
2. Easy - Long gone are the days when I had hours of spare time to play around with learning and setting up an OS.
3. Just Works - Closely related to the above, the last thing I need is to spend hours researching bug workarounds or hardware incompatibilities.
4. Large User Community - Problems are inevitable; I like to know that a quick Google search will usually find me a user forum discussion with the answer I need.
5. Keyboard-Friendly - I grew up on DOS, and I love my keyboard shortcuts.
6. Long-Term Support - A 10-year distro upgrade cycle would be ideal for me; three years would probably be the minimum.
7. Traditional Menu - After trying Unity for 8 months, I want my old-school menu back.
8. No KDE - Sorry KDE fans, but no matter how hard I try, I just can't stand the KDE look and feel.
9. Debian-based - I did explore a few distros outside the Debian family, but in the end, I decided that they didn't offer any additional features that would be worth abandoning the experience I have gained working with a Debian-based distro.

There are some great open source tools that make distro-shopping a lot easier these days. To test the various distro's, I ran them as a simulated live CD session inside a VirtualBox first. If I liked the look and feel, I used UNetbootin to load the OS onto a thumb drive and booted it as a live session on my hardware to explore it further.

So here are the top distro's that I checked out and what I learned about each, ranked in my personal order of preference, from worst to best.

Bodhi Linux

I was not a fan of Bodhi Linux. My only positive comment is that it had great hardware support. However, it comes preloaded with...virtually nothing, which obviously requires more of an initial commitment to get a workable desktop up and running. I didn't like the interface either; the menu seemed disorderly, and I had a hard time finding what I was looking for. Midori (web browser) is very slow and kept freezing when I attempted to load multiple tabs. I wasn't sure about the Mac-style launcher, although one can simply add things to the panel instead, if desired. Networking did not show up in the tray. Standard keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-F4 (for closing internal window) and Alt-D (for browser address line) did not work. Clicking on an application does not give it control. In Bodhi's defense, the version I tried was based on Ubuntu 12.04; it may be worth trying the new LTS version.

Mint

I tried the Cinammon flavor of Mint and loved it. It "just works" upon install, the system menu works great with either the mouse or the keyboard, it is supported for 5 years, and it's reasonably fast.

It is bloated, but I could live with that. The deal-killer for me is that just like post-Unity Ubuntu, system-wide custom keyboard shortcuts just don’t work reliably, which is incredibly frustrating.

Debian

The mother of distros, everyone has to try Debian sooner or later. But there is a reason so many users go with one of its descendants; Debian is just too rough around the edges for most. For example, font smoothing requires the manual editing of config files. Really? In 2014? Also, support is only provided for three years (although they’re experimenting with supporting squeeze for five years).

Crunch Bang (#!)

I really fell in love with this Debian-based distro. It is blazingly fast, has a clean, minimalist interface, and "just works" upon install, with excellent hardware support and MP3 and Flash playback preloaded. Keyboard shortcuts are well-supported, and the common ones are displayed on startup in Conky. Printer set up was easy; scanner setup, not so much...

Crunch Bang had almost everything I was looking for, but it's still a little too rough around the edges for me. For example, there is no GUI interface for adjusting the mouse speed - trying to find the right speed for your mouse without being able to use your mouse to test it can be a very frustrating task. Also, the simple task of setting the clock requires resort to the command line: sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata. Updates must be run manually, unless you install the gnome update app. UNetbootin (a must-have tool) is not in the repositories. There is no simple way to adjust the screen refresh rate. The install script would not create a swap partition on install. I had to manually edit autostart.sh to set my screen layout, mouse settings, and keyboard repeat rate. My audio crackled; I tried using alsa instead of pulseaudio, but that caused other problems. I finally tried OSS, which worked fine. Programs do not always get automatically added to the system menu upon install. I also had problems with certain programs; AbiWord would sometimes crash on opening a file; Chrome wouldn't play certain media files, and the volume control defaulted to an output I wasn't using. You get the idea...

I love the Crunch Bang concept and will give it another chance next time I'm ready to upgrade my distro, but it just isn't quite mature enough (for me) yet.

Lubuntu

Lubuntu has become my new home. (Surprise!) It is very fast, lean, keyboard-friendly, easy to navigate, and has excellent hardware and software support. The default GUI-based configuration tools are very easy to use and powerful. The interface is similar to the familiar Gnome 2.x environment.

Of course, every distro has its issues. Initially, I couldn't get it to install; it would stall after the first installer screen. Some Googling revealed that all partitions had to be deleted off my hard drive first. Huh? As with Crunch Bang, I had difficulty getting my scanner working properly. I had issues with audio in certain web pages. I had to manually add MP3 and Flash support, even though I checked the box to do so during the install. There is no GUI-based tool for editing the system menu. My mouse speed was unusually slow (and the GUI tool doesn’t make it fast enough; I have to rely on the command line). LibreOffice is ugly as heck; the interface looks like a throwback to Lotus SmartSuite or something. I had difficulty getting my dual-monitor setup to "stick."

I had to install Numlockx to get NumLock to stay on. I still have not been able to figure out how to disable screen locking after about 10 minutes. The file manager also did not initially display thumbnails for my photos. After some searching I found that in [Edit] [Preferences] under [Display] tab, the last line, thumbnails will not be generated for files over a certain size which was preset at 2000 kb...and most of my pictures are over that. I just set it to max of 32999 kb and now all my pictures ae thumbnailed in the folders. I like to store my data on a separate partition and had a challenge redirecting the default links to Documents, Music, Videos, etc. I tried “sudo leafpad ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs” and playing with those settings, but did not work reliably. The easier method that actually worked was to go to PCManFM, navigate to the folder you wish to display, and then right-click the folder and choose “Add to Bookmarks.” Also, PCManFM doesn’t find files unless you check “Use Regular Expression.” I also found the Lubuntu live session to be unreliable and freeze periodically.

But the major gripe I have with Lubuntu is its abysmal backup software support.

• Back in Time - seems to work well, but no compression
• Simple Backup - just created empty files if I used the admin mode; if I used the non-admin mode, it would work, but wouldn't run on a schedule. My final solution was to edit my startup script to force it to run a backup on every startup, which works for me, since I shut my computer off every night.
• Deja Dup - I couldn't open the backup files unless I was root, and the restore tool doesn't let you let you choose which files to restore!
• Others – I tried a couple other backup programs in the repos, such as LuckyBackup and a few others I can't now recall, but none of them worked either.

Now that most of the kinks are worked out, though, I'm very happy with Lubuntu. 

 

Conclusion

Alas, there is no perfect Linux distro. However, I did end up with an OS that met 7 of my 9 original criteria: lean, large user community, key-board friendly, long-term support, traditional menu, no KDE, and Debian-based. Hopefully next time I'll find a distro that will also be easy to set up and will truly "just work."
 

On that note, I must say that after all the hours I spent finding and setting up my OS, I personally would be ready to (wait for it...) pay for a distro that truly “just works.” Most distros “just work” until you get past the basic functionality and start asking them to do real work. Sigh. I really can't complain, though. There is so much that I love about Linux. Like the other day when our Windows file server went down, and only Linux was able to recover the data. And Linux has come such a long way even in the short few years that I've been a user; it will only get better as time goes on.