The enlightenment E17 desktop on Linux Mint 12 works a million times better than the Ubuntu packages did with 12.04. They were very unstable, but the Linux Mint 12 distribution is as stable as Linux should be. Even if it is a beta release as the Ubuntu distribution was, there is no excuse for the software to be as unreliable as Ubuntu tends to be these days. Once you install the E17 desktop with the sudo apt-get install e17 command on Linux Mint 12 and make the panel full-width and move it to the top of the screen, you have an awesome desktop. The enlightenment desktop has always been a different desktop experience to the old Gnome and KDE desktops, like Windowmaker and Fluxbox it has a place as an alternative to the domination of the more memory hungry desktop environments like KDE & Gnome, but KDE has gotten faster with the 4.8.0 release, there have been changes made to slim down the formerly bloated KDE desktop and make KDE 4.8.0 a viable contender for your default desktop. And it is much faster and more reliable than the Unity desktop. This link on my website tells you how to make KDE 4.8.0 look like KDE 3.4 with the KDE crystal theme. Getting back to the enlightenment desktop, there are many good themes that are available for enlightenment that can improve the look of your desktop as I do not like the default theme, so changing it is the second thing I do after installation.
The night-bling theme is the one I am using at the moment. If you get an error when importing this theme into the theme manager, then switch to the folder containing the theme and type: edje_convert night_bling-45.edj and the theme will be converted to the newest theme format. This works very well and then the theme may be installed and selected to change the look of your desktop.
clemejI chose unity because I’m still tinryg to like it, but I’m really not, and will probably go back to classic gnome. Here are a few reasons:- As mentioned above, its dual monitor support leaves a lot to be desired.- Searching is -not- a good paradigm for an application menu, but a tree structure is. In order for search to work, you have to know what you’re looking for.. sometimes, you don’t. I know i downloaded a word processor, but I type word processor’ into the search bar and nothing comes up. It’s a guaranteed way to install a program and then never find it again three months later when you can’t remember what its called. I would -seriously- request that the developers add the option to open a classic application menu when right clicking on the menu icon.
I miss having convenient access to my filesystem bookmarks without having to load up a nautilus window on my home folder just to open a new nautilus menu to my work project’s samba share.- Xterm crashes nouveau in natty, but that’s not a unity issue.- As mentioned above, the we -really- want to ape apple and move out menus to the top absolutely fails with focus follows mouse, since as you move up to the top menu, if you pass over another window, the menu changes to that window. Now, the solution to that is you shouldn’t use focus follows mouse , which someone in some thesis somewhere decided that was bad UI design.
This cocky we know better than you that always pervaded gnome, and now has seeped into ubuntu (starting with the anti-notification-area crusade in karmic) is really putting me off.- GVim is broken with the top menu when run from the command line, as a developer, that’s a HUGE problem.In short, i switched to ubuntu years ago because the defaults worked well enough for a power user like me out of the box, and I could spend my time working instead of tweaking my setup on every new machine. It was also simple enough my wie could sit down and use.
Ubuntu’s practical approach contrasted with gnome’s we just wont give people the option to do anything fancy . Unity throws a lot of that out the window. After having used gnome shell this week on another work machine, it suffers from the same problems.