So, I got a brain-storm in the middle of the night (night before last).
First… Ubuntu being the most popular distro, there are advantages to running it in spite of the fact that the Linux geeks who think they are all that look down on it. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty to get things working in Linux and I can pretty much solve whatever problems come up. But at the end of the day, the quicker the path is to looking good and functioning well, the better life is.
There is also an advantage to running the LTS (long-term support) versions of Ubuntu. LTS versions are released every 2 years and officially supported for 5 years. Their other versions which are released every 6 months are only supported for 9 months. I was going to switch to the LTS version awhile back, but the installer for the last LTS release (12.04) does not support LVM (which I was using). So it wasn’t going to work.
However, night before last I was able to get my native Linux backup solution working. With an external hard drive formatted ext4 and some rsync goodness, I had three copies of all my files. The time was ripe… so I re-partitioned my drives getting rid of LVM. Now I was able to install 12.04 (and proceeded to do so).
I also looked into removing the Unity junk from Ubuntu. It turns out that it’s not that hard to remove Unity and go with the standard Gnome3 desktop. So that’s exactly what I did, and it’s all working great. FYI, most of the main Linux distributions (like Fedora and Debian) default to the Gnome desktop. And most the apps I use are Gnome or GTK-based.
So in theory… I should not need to make another change until April of 2014 when the next LTS version of Ubuntu is scheduled to ship. Unless of course I find another excuse. 🙂
One big advantage to running a mainstream Linux distribution… there is tons of support on the net. Pretty much any technical question I come up with can be answered with a quick web search. That rocks!