Fire the Ubuntu staff!

Here's an idea: Why don't we just fire the entire Ubuntu staff? That way, they could go off to the Macintosh feeling guilt-free. It's a good home and a stable environment unlike the pig's breakfast they've made of Ubuntu Linux.

Or, we could be lenient. We could administer an oath to those who wish to remain:

"I hearby swear that I will do my best to disentangle Ubuntu from any notion of Unity, restore Gnome goodness, return Ubuntu to stability and resist with my very life, if necessary, any return to anything approximating Unity. I will restore to full working status and option all software that worked prior to Ubuntu Oneiric.

"I recognize that Ubuntu is a desktop platform used by many, but most especially, by software engineers whose delight is accomplishing productive work with the minimum of intrusion by experimental fantasies in unproven and cumbersome graphical user interfaces.

"I will furthermore return the window title bar controls to the right side leaving their relocation on the left side merely as an option and I will resist all further 'Macintosh wanna-be inspiration or temptation'.

"So swear I for myself and for all my descendants."

Otherwise, it's off to Mint for me.

A new era begins...

I began putting a period to a blessed life pre-Unity today at work as I relegated my primary development host, running Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat, to second fiddle while I picked up and am now playing (identical HP hardware) on Precise Pangolin with Unity (12.04LTS).

I really do not like Unity as compared to Gnome. I develop software and I can't see how using Unity helps me do that better than using Gnome. Mostly, it gets in my way.

And chasing Unity off and restoring Gnome isn't fun and easy, nor was it altogether successful the time I tried it last November. I don't just want Gnome, mind you, I want it exactly how I've had it and I could not reach that point in the few hours I allotted to the experiment. I also don't want to have to hack every new OS I install, so before fleeing Ubuntu altogether, I'm going to see how badly my productivity is afflicted by Unity.

So here I am with about half my crucial development tools running on the newer operating system and the ones that don't still running under Maverick. Principally, I can't get Remmina to work and I need it to replace tsclient. I'm also struggling with Thunderbird in some ways. Today I finally got it set up to do my HP mail, but then it refused to do my personal mail.

The reason for this bothersome detour from productive life? Lucid Lynx LTS expires next April. Maverick already expired last April.

At home I'm going to be undertaking much the same journey if with less angst about how fast and well it works.