I've been using Ubuntu Linux on my netbook for the past couple of days and I'm quite pleased with the whole experience, except for the initial issues (I just won't trust the auto-update).
Ubuntu uses the Gnome desktop environment by default with a little bit of tweaking. Gnome UI designers have a sense of aesthetic cognizance to their designs. I've always appreciated the crisp icons and the polished dialogs. I've been known to throw around the word stunning, quite generously, while describing Gnome.
All these initial infatuations almost made me forget the reasons why I abandoned Gnome a few years ago. I hate the absence of a central control center to tweak the default behavior of Gnome. There is however a severely handicapped version called gconf-editor which is like a terrible cousin of Windows Registry. So now if you want sloppy focus on gnome that doesn't raise your window when you click on it, you just have to do the following simple steps:
- Open gconf-editor
- apps
- metacity
- general
- raise on click (uncheck)
Quite intuitive wouldn't you agree?
Oh you want to enable compositing, so your gnome-do can have some slick skins, here's how you achieve that:
- Open gconf-editor
- apps
- metacity
- general
- compositing_manager (check)
Why? Why would you think this is more intuitive than having a simple GUI driven control center? I'm told this was a conscious choice by Gnome developers because giving choices tend to confuse their users.
If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.
No wonder Linus was pissed at Gnome and started recommending KDE.