[clug] Upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 has destroyed Gnome customisation

[jhock]

Hi All,

Thank you so much for your replies both on and off the list.  

I decided to try MATE because it seemed the simplest. At first it went
well with the following commands in a terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/ppa
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/trusty-mate
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-mate-core ubuntu-mate-desktop

But then I had trouble with the mate-applet trying to use the
gnome-applet. There was a clash so I had to:

sudo dpkg -P gnome
sudo dpkg -P gnome-applets
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get update

The last command gave no errors.

Sorry if these commands seem obvious but maybe someone else wants to
switch away from the gnome 3 and Unity way of doing things.

It was risky purging gnome to get rid of the gnome-applets but I was
getting sick of the gnome 3 direction, as others have also indicated.

The restart gave me the Ubuntu MATE desktop option so I logged in using
it. The default display was almost exactly what I wanted. I only had to
change the following:

- change the background to my favourite Pink Floyd image of a stained
glass window showing the dark side of the moon album cover (it just
looks nice to me)
- Added midori and evolution to the top panel and
- auto hid the top and bottom panel.

All these changes were easy to do and logical in how to do it. EG. right
click on panel and applications etc. It alls looks nice and functional
to me.

Anyway, thanks again to all those who made suggestions. I love being on
this list. The suggestions are so helpful.

John.

On Sun, 2014-10-26 at 09:39 +1100, George at Clug wrote:
>     Cinnamon - Simplicity and beauty in one.   As Cinnamon is now a
> user installation option in Jessie, I intend to use it as my Desktop
> when Jessie moves to stable. I recently installed Jessie + Cinnamon to
> a old Netbook that was struggling to run Windows XP. I am amazed how
> well it performs. Even plugged in a Telstra Turbo Modem, which it
> recognised, and with in a few minutes I had selected the correct data
> plan and was connected to the Interent.
> 
> MATE - I have not tried Mate.  Sounds like I should give it a test
> out, if Paul is using MATE, it must have something going for it.
> 
> George
> 
> 
> 
> At Sunday, 26-10-2014 on 07:17 Paul Wayper wrote:
> 
> 
> On 24/10/14 17:17, jhock wrote:
> [snip]
> > Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
> > 
> > Totally p*$#ed off John.
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> Ever since GNOME 3 came along I've been using MATE.  I don't recall
> how it
> went with picking up my existing settings, but it basically has all of
> the
> look and feel of GNOME 2 without some of the bloat.  And it works
> perfectly
> on my (ageing) Inspiron 6400 - GNOME 2 worked fine and Compiz worked
> well
> too, and then GNOME 3 decides that it doesn't have OpenGL so it goes
> back to
> 'compatibility' mode, which turns out to be 'run really slowly' mode.
> 
> An alternative to try is Cinnamon, which is basically a fork of GNOME
> by the
> Linux Mint team who didn't like the way GNOME Shell worked.  It's
> GTK3+
> based, which means you get some of the new feature set, but without
> the IMHO
> crappy new look.  Even GNOME Shell is a step up from Unity (also
> IMO).
> 
> LXDE and XFCE are even more light-weight window managers, if you're
> still
> finding MATE annoying.
> 
> Have fun,
> 
> Paul
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>