I write a lot about encryption. I'm not trying so much to keep the government out of my business but to give myself peace of mind in the event my machine is lost or stolen.

I want to know that it would be way too much trouble for anybody to try to get any data out of the machine so I can confidently carry around a laptop and know that nobody else can get to that data if it leaves my possession.

But there's one problem with the kind of encryption provided by the installers for Debian and Fedora: The global (or individual) passphrase(s).

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I've been wondering how you adjust the number of virtual workspaces on the Unity desktop in Ubuntu 12.04.

Well, you can add more or take some away. This AskUbuntu.com article shows you how to do it.

We users of Linux are a fickle lot. We flit here and there, from one distro to another, even to a BSD on occasion.

I've been "loyal" to Debian for a couple years now. It works. But it's time for a change.

Given the demise of GNOME 2 in favor of the radically reimagined GNOME 3, I've been "auditioning" everything from CrunchBang (Openbox with Xfce's Thunar file manager) and Bodhi (Enlightenment) to Fedora (GNOME 3 and Xfce), Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu and Debian Wheezy.

I go back and forth on GNOME 3 and Unity. Sometimes I think I can be productive in these very different environments. Other times I wonder what's wrong with having a traditional application menu.

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I know ... Ubuntu 12.04 is in beta right now, I installed a daily build, and my Thinkpad R32 is 10 years old and has only 512 MB of RAM backing up a single-core Pentium 4 CPU.

But this is not the hardware that can adequately run Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity.

Everything was slow, the laptop was swapping like mad, the Software Center crashed more than a few times, and I couldn't make HUD work (not sure what it's for, to be honest, if it works this poorly -- I couldn't make it actually do anything).

Trust me, Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 (which could only run in Classic mode) wasn't this bad.

I'm downloading ISOs of a Debian Wheezy daily (or is it weekly?) build and Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 to try now.

Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 is up next (again). I'll let you know how it compares to Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity.

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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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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