Where to go from Ubuntu 10.10?

Since it was announced that my favorite desktop distro from the end of 2005, Ubuntu would be switching to their own Unity Desktop, from Natty Narwhal (2012/10) I have been somewhat worried about the future of Ubuntu on my desktop.

For years I would install every major release of Ubuntu that came out, but decided from Karmic Koala (2009/10) that skipping every second release would not have much of an effect on my daily work. Missing a few new features, did not make up for the installation time.

When the announcement was made that Unity would be the primary desktop on Natty Narwhal (2011/04) an onwards, I began looking into the pros and cons. Fortunately due to my update schedule, I would miss the first release of Ubuntu with Unity and therefore hoped it would reach a more mature state before it had to serve as my working environment.

Oneiric Ocelot (2011/10) had now reached beta, and I decided to spin it up for a quick review. Besides my own testing I have read a bunch of reviews and tests.

I have come to the conclusion, that Ubuntu Unity is not going to fulfill my needs for a desktop working environment, but where to go? And so my quest for a new distrobution begins.....

History

Over the years I have had many distributions installed including RedHat, Debian, Gentoo, OpenSuse, CentOS, Kubuntu, Ubuntu and many others. I always prefered the Debian based ones over RedHat, but it is hard for me to put a finger on the RedHat based releases, except that I never quite felt they made me feel at home.

This is often considered one of the major religious discussions along side Gnome vs. KDE and of course Linux vs. BSD. I will not go into further discussion on this topic, but continue my quest for a desktop distribution to replace Ubuntu primarely within the Debian branch.

Unity

Seems like a lot of newcomers will welcome the simplicity of Unity, but when that is said, it will take a lot of efford from Canonical to get the developers to write applications that support the interface. Fortunately Canonical is probably one of the few companies within the industry that can actually do just that. It will be exciting to see where Unity is 12 months from now.

Gnome Shell

During my testing of Unity, I had the pleasure of experiencing Gnome Shell, which really impressed me. However I still do not find it quite mature enough for a production environment and some of the tools that I have come to love from the older versions of Ubuntu just was not available yet. I am sure that within time Gnome Shell will have a lot to offer in terms of flexibility and stream lined workflow, but for now, I will have to let it wait.

Kubuntu

In the past I tried Jaunty Jackalope (2009/04), but was not overly impressed with the default packages from KDE and it still had some stability issues. I tried really hard for about three months to like Kubuntu, but as with the RedHat based distros, I just never felt at home.

In my desperate attempt to find a worthy replacement for my Ubuntu, I decided to try Kubuntu once again. After installing Natty Narwhal (2011/04) I once again found myself in the KDE world. It look so pretty and yet so different from the Gnome environment I had been used to.

I quickly realized that nothing much had changed and I was still unhappy with the mail reader (KMail) and several of the other applications that were essential for my daily use.

Linux Mint (Debian)

Instead of installing Debian, I then decided to try a recently new branch of Mint, who had evolved from Ubuntu some time ago and had proven itself worthy. Several of my friends had praised this distro as a good alternative, but I didn't like the idea of a distribution that was based off Ubuntu, which was then based off Debian. It just seemed messy. The people behind Mint have probably felt the same, or at least though many of their users though so, so they recently build a Mint version based directly on Debian (LMDE). After a painfully long install with hours of patching (Mind you, I sit in Thailand where connections are poor at best), Mint came to life and it looked and felt like something that I recongnized part of in Ubuntu, but also had the clean feel of Debian.

Had I found my new home?