Choice is one of many reasons why I really like this distribution over the other popular flavours right now. I share the same dissatisfaction for Unity and Gnome 3 with most of the community. While this is the main reason for jumping ship and crashing the Mint party, there are some really simple things I like, like Dropbox.

Parted Magic is everything the gparted livecd tries to be times ten. Included in the barebones desktop are Partimage, TestDisk, Truecrypt, Clonezilla, G4L, SuperGrubDisk, ddrescue, and more.

What I don’t like about Gnome 3 desktop is how it hides everything from you under multiple layers of mouse clicks in order to try to simplify. But what it does is over categorize everything! This would work just fine on a tablet pc, but I’m on a desktop or full laptop and I consider myself a power user!

You can fetch the values of any given key, but it’s rather hard to see the whole picture looking at it pixel-by-pixel or line-by-line. Start up gconf-editor and you can browse like a windows registry. Check out the things under apps and desktop. Perhaps you have a multitude of changes to make or you want to create an RPM that installs some applets, or changes the look and feel? All you need is to define the type and provide the path to the key you want to set in the gconf registry. Command-line gconftool-2 to the rescue!

The biggest reasons seem to be stability and performance utilizing some features of OpenGL. It’s about time someone takes the big leap and wrangles the X monster. If you were to start from scratch right now, designing GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc., all without Xorg’s quirks and limitations, would it come out the same? I don’t think so.

Here’s how to make GDM stop showing *every* user account at login screen by default. I don’t know why they released gdm with the broken gdmsetup and showing all accounts in the window by default.

Most Linux distributions today boot to a graphical desktop environment by default. Whether that desktop environment is KDE, GNOME, Xfce, or one of the more obscure offerings, that choice is up to you. You can mix and match from different terminals too. The exceptions to this rule would be forensics distributions and a barebones secure installation that would either have a desktop environment but choose not to load it or it might not be installed at all.

If you need to forward X the old school unencrypted way, you need to add one line to gdm’s custom.conf file and restart the desktop. Without this, the old “xhost +” won’t do a thing because the out of the box Xorg configuration includes the nolisten tcp flag.

Python’s keyring lib supports Windows win32crypto, Mac OS X’s SXKeychain, KDE’s KWallet, Gnome’s keyring, and encrypted or unencrypted password files. When your application wants to store or fetch data from the keyring, it will just work.

There’s a hidden easter egg in Gnome. This will work on Ubuntu and Fedora at least.