[rescue] [geeks] Solaris being discontinued? Rumors flying

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2016 at 12:12:35PM +0200, Jonathan Groll wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Dec 2016 10:43:21 +0100, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > From a
> > > usability standpoint, in Unity desk top, I could never find anything...I
> > > found myself at the CL more than I thought I would.
> > 
> > I find that very strange. Examples?
> 
> A lot of the settings are hidden in tweak tools.
> 
> Speaking purely for myself, I find some of the Unity defaults
> tiresome  - side-pinned dock, unified menu bar and unnecessary search
> results (adverts/wikipedia pages) when I'm searching for an app. The
> defaults could be more 'sane'.

I turn off the search results crap immediately.  That is easy enough.
I presume some people like it.

While it is reasonable to want to more easily move the Dock, I'm
pretty happy with where it is, so I rarely have reason to recall it
can't be moved.  If I used a vertical monitor, I'm sure I'd hate that
limitation though.

The only other thing I especially customize is mapping Caps Lock to
Ctrl, which used to be in System Setting, but now requires GNOME Tweak
Tool, which sometimes if flaky.
 
> > I started using it on a Pentium M with 1GB RAM and no hardware OpenGL.
> > That wasn't good. But on a 2GB system with hardware 3D, it's OK. With
> > 3-4GB or more, it flies. Any decent PC newer than about 2007-2008
> > should be fine. I don't own any PCs newer than that and my Mac is from
> > 2011. Unity feels quicker than native OS X on the Mac.
> 
> Even with my comments above, I somehow still have Unity as my default
> desktop on an Ubuntu box at home (the ones my kids use). Even though
> 'should be fine' is put in there, it really isn't all that fine on my
> 2012 era machine with 4GB RAM and Nvidia graphics and no SSD. I can
> only assume then that it is an assumption that it should be fine on
> older hardware? I'm actually thinking about upgrading or replacing
> this machine.

I have Unity on a number of older machines that probably wouldn't be
considered decent, and it still seems to work quite decently.  I'm
typing this on a 1.1ghz machine from 2011 with Intel Graphics.  I've
also used it on very old Atoms with Nvidia and Intel graphics options.
I don't recall using it with no GL acceleration though.  There used to
be a Unity 2D option that worked really well, but I guess that was
removed in 12.10.  After that point the fall back position was
llvmpipe, which not shockingly was a bit of a CPU drain.

At this point I'd go to Lubuntu if I was faced with a lack of GL.