GNOME Panel dropped in 11.10

[delan at azabani.com]

Hi Francis,

> I'm left with this dilemma. Neither Unity nor GNOME Shell fits my
> needs. What am I going to do in 6 months?

You may get a 'better' answer from someone who is more involved in Ubuntu
development, and this is my opinion. Being a moderately long user of
Ubuntu (though I wasn't there from the start), I've watched as Ubuntu
evolved through its versions, and I, personally, have been disappointed by
11.04, and, to a lesser extent, 10.10. This may stem from what, in my
opinion, is Ubuntu's long-term vision to be a big commercial player on all
form factors.

There are other OSes which have superior package management and avoid
restricting you in any way. About three months ago, I had completely
switched from Ubuntu to Gentoo (though I use Debian for computers that are
too slow to feasibly compile a whole OS). Gentoo is a source-based OS with
a brilliant package manager, Portage, that automates the building and
installing process, along with any customisations that you would like,
just like building from source externally. Portage also has a feature
called 'slots' where you can install different major versions of packages,
often multiple at once. This makes installing the real Gnome 2 (which is
at version 2.32 as far I as I remember) easy.

Contrary to my expectations, Gentoo is actually very easy to use and
doesn't get in my way. Installing Gentoo is more involved than Ubuntu, as
you must set up some things manually, but it is smooth if you follow the
instructions on the Gentoo website.

I hope that my advice helped you.

Thanks and best regards,
Delan Azabani