I decided to pull what I call The Laptop out of its bag and update the Debian Squeeze installation that has been running on this 233 MHz Pentium II machine since soon after the most recent Debian release went Stable in February 2011.

Prior to that, the now-12-year-old laptop -- which is as solid as a tank except for the weak joints where the screen pivots -- ran Debian Lenny for a long while.

I've written many dozen blog entries about Linux and BSD systems running on this machine, which I bought for (I probably overpaid) back in 2007 (or was it '08?) when I wanted a laptop but couldn't find anything I could afford.

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I've been spending time each day working in Ubuntu 11.10's GNOME 3/Unity and Fedora 16's GNOME 3/GNOME Shell desktops.

They're more alike than you think. Rather than do things the GNOME way, Ubuntu/Canonical decided to take its own direction with Unity, which is now, like GNOME Shell, built on top of GNOME 3.

They look and work more alike than you'd think.

I find it puzzling. But in a way it makes sense.

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The more I figure out how GNOME 3/Shell works in Fedora 16, the more I like it.

I'm not at the point where I can say, "Oh, it's totally better than GNOME 2," but I'm increasingly able to do things the way I'm accustomed to doing in the GNOME Shell environment.

I will refrain from comparing how things work in Fedora 16/GNOME Shell vs. Ubuntu 11.10/Unity until I spend more time in the latter. But this comparison is at the forefront of my thinking about which direction my Linux desktop use will go in during the year ahead.

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Since I spent some time running Fedora 16 with GNOME 3/GNOME Shell via a live image, and I judged it as working well but not as polished in the design department as Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 with Unity, I figured I should give Ubuntu 11.10 a try with its live image and see what I thought.

So I grabbed a 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 ISO. Since I was already in Debian Squeeze, and Debian and Ubuntu ISO images these days are "hybrid" images that can be burned to CD the usual way, or easily (very easily!) dropped onto a USB thumb drive, I found the 4 GB drive I used for my Ubuntu 11.04 test and put 11.10 on it.

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I've spent probably more than a year avoiding new distributions, new releases, distro reviews and the dreaded "I ran the live CD of Project X and here's what happened" posts.

But I'm in an inquisitive mood. And here is one of those "I ran the live CD for an hour" reviews. Take it for the proverbial what it's worth.

My earlier tests of GNOME 3 (in OpenSUSE) were a bit of a bust, and while my tests of Unity in Ubuntu 11.04's live environment went well, I wasn't sufficiently moved enough to take the next step (which I suppose would be throwing over good ol' Debian Squeeze and GNOME 2 for Ubuntu with Unity).

Today I decided to give Fedora 16 and its GNOME 3/GNOME Shell desktop a try.

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http://fedora.org/

I never really considered myself a GNOME user. Though I am. I've used Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm2, LXDE, even JWM (Joe's Window Manager) in Puppy and FLTK in TinyCore. But most of the time I stick with the default desktop environment offered by a given distribution.

And more often than not, that's GNOME 2. And I've been using Debian Squeeze with GNOME 2 since November 2010 -- almost a year now -- and using it for more of my work than ever.

I don't consider myself a "power user," but I am pushing this desktop environment and this distribution pretty hard. I've got a lot of software installed -- most from the Debian repositories, some from other repos and a few packages from third parties (usually the upstream developers themselves). I run Dropbox. I create, edit and mix audio, I edit video. I crunch hundreds of images. Code web pages. Write. Browse the web with Iceweasel and Google Chrome. Watch TV shows from Hulu and various other sites, including CBS.com.

I can suspend/resume without rebooting for days at a time. That's probably the best thing about this particular instance of Linux and my particular hardware (the not-terribly impressive Lenovo G555). I've never had this level of functionality before in Linux or BSD.

NetworkManager has been great. I've used it to connect to wired, WiFi and 3G networks, all seamlessly. My old-school ext3 filesystems managed under encrypted LVM have run perfectly the whole time. I do backups via rsync.

It all just works. It's Debian Stable with the now old and abandoned GNOME 2.

What will happen to Debian's default desktop environment by the time the current Testing distribution, Wheezy, itself becomes Stable sometime in early 2013? Will GNOME 3 have settled down by then, or will Debian turn to another DE, maybe Xfce, for its main desktop? I'll worry about it then. If this hardware holds out, it'll probably do so with Debian Squeeze and the 2.6.37 kernel that handles this hardware perfectly.

GNOME's supposed to be slow. I've really never found that to be true -- and certainly not on this laptop made in March 2010.

It's not "pure" Squeeze. I have Debian Backports, the Mozilla Debian APT archive, Liquorix (and now newer kernels from Backports if I want them), Debian Multimedia, plus repositories for Google Chrome and Dropbox. But the core is a distribution that "froze" some time in mid-2010 and released in February 2011. It keeps on working, and so do I. Can't argue with that.

I’m in the process of moving the entries from this blog into my new site at http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog. Eventually I hope to have the Debian posts on that blog, running under the Ode platform, appearing with their own theme, something (i.e. different themes for different parts of the same site) that is very possible to do in Ode, a system developed by Rob Reed to use flat files like FlatPress, but in a less-WordPress-ish and more Blosxom-y way.

Today I turned off comments for all of these FlatPress blog entries because they have been attracting a significant amount of spam.

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ZDNet writer David Gerwitz is so fed up with the way his co-located Linux server responded to an upgrade (by not running) that he's made a huge deal out of giving up Linux for Windows. On a server.

Fellow ZDNet writer and Linux partisan Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols (aka SJVN) wonders what all the shouting is about.

In case you hadn't guessed, I'm with SJVN on this one. Sure I've bricked a few Linux and BSD installations in my time, but when it comes to production systems, it's extremely easy to stay on the straight and narrow with Linux and BSD. Upgrades can be tricky, but that's true for Windows, too. I'm taking upgrades from one release to another.

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Ever since Ubuntu shipped its first long-term-support release, the 6.06 Dapper Drake (one of my all-time favorites by the way), the distro's LTS editions have enjoyed three years of support on the desktop and five years on the server.

Now Canonical is extending desktop support for the upcoming 12.04 LTS (to be named Precise Pangolin) to a full five years on both the desktop and server, making the release that much more compelling for enterprise users and others (like myself) who might not necessarily stick with the release for the full five years but want the option of doing so.

It makes the quality and stability of this next release that much more important, as SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth enumerated in a blog post yesterday.

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