There is an Estonian legend telling about the Old Man of Ülemiste (Lake Ülemiste is the water source for most of Tallinn, the capital) visiting the city gates every midsummer and asking if the city is ready. The guards are instructed to answer negatively – as the Old Man will drown the city when it’s finished. Luckily, no city will ever be completed.
And neither will Free and Open-Source Software.
That said, during the last two years, the development of mainstream Linux distros has reached a nasty sort of limbo. Starting from the early days of Mandrake and Red Hat (I moved to Linux in August 2000), there have almost always been some efforts around to make Linux understandable for ordinary people as well. Sure, for several years it was still ‘hacker stuff’ but the effort was there. Slowly and gradually, Linux distros became more usable – the whole new boost was given to it with the emergence of Ubuntu in the mid-2000s.
I don’t know if it was some kind of collective madness, some insidious death rays sent by aliens bribed by proprietary software companies, or the fear of losing one’s job when Linux is ready (did they meet the Old Man of Ülemiste?) – anyhow, somewhere around 2010 it happened. It was the long anticipated “Year of Desktop Linux”, but with a minus sign. First, KDE 4 was a royal bummer. Then the upcoming GNOME 3 decided to follow. And finally, the makers of THE Linux for Ordinary People and the ones who initially had helped a lot to make free software easier to use – Canonical – dreamed up a huge turd of a desktop, named it Unity and decided to force everyone to use it.
Sure, the users’ uproar was there – and Ubuntu has since then lost its top place at the Distrowatch list, practically for the first time after its introduction. Yet, those roaring hacker types flicked up a finger towards Canonical, mumbled some obscenities and then proceeded to download and install Fedora, Debian, Arch, OpenSuse etc (and dumping the bloated desktops for XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox and others). But the newcomers were silently unhappy. And a number of them went back to Windows (some richer ones went to Apple, too).
I personally have used the pre-madness Ubuntu 10.04 LTS since (long support and works well with data projectors – something an academic needs daily; it was also messed up in new versions). Yet, after a year of confusion, I now may at least have something to install on the ordinary guy’s machine.
The (at least temporary) solution is Linux Mint 12 (which incidentally is the new top guy on the Distrowatch list) with the MATE desktop (a fork of the pre-madness GNOME 2). It is possible to set up a nice workplace with configurability, less bloat and still nice appearance.
What I did:
* installed the packages compizconfig-settings-manager (with dependencies) and compiz-fusion-plugins-main (enabling some nice things like Shift and Ring Switcher in Compiz)
* added the line ‘compiz –replace’ to the Startup list
* restarted and switched the session to MATE
Optionally, to achieve a Mac-like dock functionality and to reduce the messy-ish Mint menu to a backup feature:
* install avant-window-navigator and awn-settings (with dependencies)
* add the ‘avant-window-navigator’ to the Startup list
* move the bottom panel to the top and perhaps make it almost transparent
* to switch tasks, I use the Rotate Cube for workspaces and Ring Switcher for windows, but there are other ways
* an idea is also use some the top panel for some icons which run rarely needed administrative tasks (in order to separate them from the everyday stuff in the dock).
I haven’t had a chance to test out data projectors yet – but if the configuration handles them well, I’ll likely also switch. At least this is something that I could set up for my parents without scaring them unconscious.