It blows my mind that people are still using Ubuntu on the desktop. I actually thought for a moment that Ubuntu had disabled the ability of users to shut down their system. Yes- I only saw 'suspend' as an option when I went to the shutdown button. The reason is I was behind the lock screen. Seems like a bad design, but that might just be GNOME.

I have a ton of criticism for Canonical, but the most recent is they utterly dropped the ball for the 2nd time in a decade when it comes to USB wifi adapters. They failed to include the firmwares in 26.04 and so hundreds of thousands of users are unable to connect to the internet.

The only other "distribution" that I am aware of that has gotten it this wrong is "Purism's" ???? (I'm going blank with the name at the moment) and humorously that was worse because they didn't include the only free firmware in a distribution that only works with free software friendly hardware (theoretically, it appears they actually include non-free software, or they've been caught doing it repeatedly anyhow.. and stuff they should have caught... every other distro did).

This entry was edited (Tuesday, June 2, 2026, 3:53 AM)

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in reply to Mr Penguin

@Mr Penguin, I use Ubuntu on a workstation but I don't use it's native UI, I use Mate. I liked the old Gnome-2 menu driven, I could easily change menu items, re-arrange panels and what is on them as desired, and when Gnome-3 came out and took all that flexibility away I moved to Mate which is basically a Gnome-2 clone ported to modern GTK.
in reply to Nanook

Yea... I think XFCE4 is probably the closest modern equivalent of GNOME 2. Although maybe I've got this a little wrong. I think they re-based MATE off GNOME 3 components. It's not like Trinity with KDE 3.x (arguably KDE's best version, though seriously dated today).

Actually XFCE4 needs some tweaks to make it work reasonably well. The file manager leaves one wanting. It's a bit buggy.

This entry was edited (Tuesday, June 2, 2026, 3:58 AM)
in reply to Mr Penguin

@Mr Penguin Mate is much closer, I do keep xfce as a backup in case something gets corrupted, but Mate is visually identical by default but way more configurable and if you use compiz you can get some real nice effects like rotating cube workspace switcher. I am presently using Mate 1.28.

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