Utopia

I was down in the lab the other day sitting in front of my perfectly serviceable computer, and I got annoyed that I had to click three times and type a <t> in order to get a terminal window open so that I could stare at a command line in a bash shell. So I said to myself 'I hate the Unity desktop! There are over a hundred Linux distributions out there, there has to be a better OS than this.' So I killed the partition and installed Mint12RC instead. But the RC isn't the stable version, that won't be out till the end of the month. So the desktop was bigger than the screen even adjusted to its native resolution so I couldn't see both the top action bar and the bottom action bar and none of the corners where the menu buttons were supposed to be, and then the package manager hung every time I went looking for a library (and I'm always needing another library) and that was it. I said 'I'll go back to their last stable version.' so I deleted that partition and installed Mint11 instead. I didn't make the mistake of trying the nVidia drivers, because I knew through hard experience that nVidia not only has never heard of my monitor, but as a whole they find the experience of shaking hands with it so alienating that they never recognise another monitor ever again, as if my monitor (and it was a tremendous bargain) were made in the South Pacific on an uncharted island leased to the United States somehow but inhabited by Dagon-worshipping crypto-mermaids bent on a highly improbable outcome involving messing with people's graphics. But I still had the same problem with the desktop being too big. So I said 'Hey, everything I've tried so far has been Ubuntu-based, maybe I'll try Fedora instead.' Fedora 16 has a really cool background wallpaper, an undersea scene that really needs a hint of Cthulhu in it somewhere, but again, Gnome 3 has all the controls in the corners (where else are they going to be??) and the corners are all out of view. Tomorrow I think I'll try openSuSe12. What the heck. And then maybe (if I'm lucky) I'll just go back to Ubuntu11.10 where I started, because hey, it wasn't broken.