I considered both of them before installing Elementary (elementaryos.org). So far, I'm very pleased with it and seriously looking forward to their Luna release (will be based on 12.04). Best quick, friendly, not-gnome-ridden-to-disaster Ubuntu respin I've used.

Added. Any papercuts so far? Any list of workarounds? (I am accumulating such a list to get Xfce to behave how I want.)

No, not really. It gives a very nicely stripped-down version of GNOME. I think their email client has a ways to go yet (Postler), but I don't actually use it, so that doesn't really effect me.

I would also suggest a browse through their dev section with attention to their interface guidelines. This team has not put the cart before the horse. They've created a consistent, rational guide to how they want their environment to operate and are building it out, a piece at a time.

Customization is not, initially, available for a lot of things, but there are instructions on the wiki and forums for enabling it. I haven't found much of a need to tinker, however. They did a lot right out of the box.

To recap: currently using LXDE (installed on top of a standard Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade) as a transitional thing while I tend to a sick hard drive.

I also tried out Lubuntu (Ubuntu running LXDE by default) on a LiveCD, and noticed two minor differences from Ubuntu+LXDE: (1) Synaptic has no "quick-search" box, and (2) Kate has menus, yay.

The lack of Kate menus on Ubuntu+LXDE is probably due to bad influence from Unity, which likes to take other applications out and lead them slowly into a life of crime.

The good and the bad:
+1 You can right-click on entries in the app menu to edit them.
-1 You can't right-click on entries in the app menu to run them in the "run" window.
-2 You can't right-click on the app menu itself to invoke the menu editor.

(+1, -1, and -2 existed in KDE 3.x; +1 and -1 were removed for KDE 4.x, which was the primary motivating factor for my switching from KDE to Gnome.)

ElementaryOS looks interesting -- I presume it's another GNU/Linux spin, though they don't actually say so...

+Woozle Staddon ElementaryOS Jupiter is based on Ubuntu 10.10. The upcoming Luna will be based on 12.04. It's an Ubuntu respin with all of the access to package repositories that implies.

I follow the LXDE project a bit - I used it for a while, then found I didn't need the whole DE, and Openbox mostly works quite nicely for me.* Moved to CrunchBang which is basically a really cool implementation of Openbox. (It also has an Xfce version, but super-lean Xfce, not like you've seen it before.)

*Until something doesn't work (like my audio, currently) and then I'm lost. But the forum is excellent - helpful, and friendly even to people using other distros.

I don't mind shiny (i.e nice graphics that take extra CPU/RAM), especially now that I have a system capable of handling it; what baffles me is when they put in more shiny while removing useful features... the mindset is alien to me.

You put in shiny when you have power to spare; when you don't have power to spare, you sacrifice a bit of shiny to keep your utility features. End of story.

</rant form=mild>

Features may confuse a user and are therefore evil. This is literally the GNOME mindset. I am not exaggerating.

Shiny for shiny's sake is pointless. Shiny because you made something function and want it to be both beautiful & functional...that's a worthy effort.

One of the things I like most about elementary is how they've eliminated so much of the interface cruft that has become the norm with GNOME in favor of simple, functional interfaces that also happen to look good and present themselves consistently. I'm really looking forward to their Nautilus replacement (Marlin) and the further development of their music player (Beatbox).

There's some truth in that it sometimes is evil; I've broken my gnome3 installation on the laptop by pulling one package too many from experimental and decided to just wait until all of it will be migrated to unstable…

I decided to give a try to xfce; it worked almost exactly as I wanted it to, with one exception: I couldn't find where to enable the advanced keyboard configuration (compose key etc), and I couldn't find it.

I then decided to try kde4, and it's pretty neat, but it took me a few hours to configure it to the same level of convenience that is given by the default GNOME configuration; way too long.

+Mirosław Baran I think both major desktops have gotten far afield of where they were originally headed. Miguel de Icaza's twitter feed is enlightening in this regard.

Miroslaw - see my link above - there is no configurator in Xfce for the advanced Xkb options as yet - you need to do it by hand.

Weird thing I've just noticed: I save downloaded files to ~/Downloads and then c'n'p them to the network drive. Nautilus brings up the file operation window as usual ... but I can't alt-tab to it! It doesn't show up in the window manager's list!

I've heard similar things elsewhere - even from the Gnome project, though expressed in a positive way. I only ever used Gnome for a few months, and from these descriptions, I'm not tempted to return.
I don't like the assumption that I will use the mouse (I'm guessing that's behind your experience, +David Gerard, with not being able to alt-tab to the window you want?) It's my choice, and I generally choose the keyboard.

I'm fine with the mouse. The problem is the file transfer window doesn't show up anywhere - it's not in the alt-tab list, it's not in the taskbar ... if I click off it, I can't get it back. What?

+David Gerard said (paraphrasing Gnome's philosophy) "Features may confuse a user and are therefore evil." Wow. Just... wow.

That attitude has to go.

It sounds like an oversimplification, but it's been that way for years: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00019.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00022.html - GNOME3 is just the idea taken to its extreme.

That's incredible. If they think that full feature access is too complicated for some users, then just have an "advanced" mode which is disabled by default.

Lack of feature access was one of our chronic gripes about Linux GUIs, but we always figured it was something they were "working on" and would get to eventually. I have to say I'm a little bit shocked to find that the opposite is true.

"Advanced" mode is arguably a failure of integration and should be looked at as a great big FIXME. But, that's not a reason to just go into denial about the need for access to said features. Menu editing and Xkb options are missing from Xfce because no-one's written them yet, not because they're evil.

It is possible to have a system that is easy-to-use for n00bs and powerfully-useful for geeks. I think of successes like LiveJournal (which was amazing for the former) and Mac OS X (though Lion is pissing off a lot of power users). In fact, you have to satisfy both simultaneously or suck. This is not easy, but it is achievable. The GNOME solution is just wrong.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/has-gnome-3-decided-that-people-shouldnt-want-screen-savers/

Yeah. GNOME has officially jumped the shark. Nothing left to do but pick through the bones and start over.

+David Gerard On the one hand, screensavers are a waste of electricity and DE's should just power off by default. But xscreensaver is so small, and it's such a standard feature, it's crazy that someone has to Google and uninstall and install things to get their screensaver working if they - wrongly ;-) - want it.

+Anna Ominous "That attitude has to go." - the attitude clearly isn't going anywhere. It's you who have to go, along with anyone who wants a desktop environment that makes sense. Find somewhere that doesn't frustrate you.

+David Gerard, one of your links is a strongly worded email from Linus T to Jeff Waugh of GNOME. In Jeff's defence, he gave a reasonable and respectful reply, and he seems to have a different view of what GNOME is/was aiming for - Jeff strikes me as an intelligent and reasonable person (met him a few times, as well as his wife Pia) and I wouldn't expect such nonsense from him. He's moved onto other things from GNOME now - don't know his more recent opinions about the project.

But the following is just... I search in vain for an alternative to phenomenally stupid...:
"In GNOME 3.0, we’re defaulting to suspending the computer when the user shuts the lid, and not providing any preferences combobox to change this. This is what the UI designers for GNOME 3.0 want, and is probably a step in the right direction. We really can’t keep working around bugs in the kernel with extra UI controls." - http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2011/02/02/is-gnome-3-going-to-melt-your-laptop/

Someone almost enticed me into GNOME in the hope that fixing my audio would be easier. But I am now forewarned...

Yes, clearly computing isn't for me (to paraphrase Google apologists).

Re screensavers: yes, they're basically a waste of power -- in the same sense as TV, which is also visual entertainment. (In other words: I don't watch TV because I want to prevent screen burn-in. Preventing screen burn-in is not the purpose of watching TV. (edited for clarity))

Using E16 with an eye for E17 on Debian KDE install. Both are very fast, powerful and make it relatively easy to configure the things that matter to me. E17 is better in almost all ways from E16 besides a lack of multiple virtual desktops and multiple monitor handling so I stick with E16 for daily work. Kpowermanager, Kmix, KGPG, Klipper, Akregator, Kmail, Kopete and a few other applications live in the systray and provide basic function. Icon box provides access to applications that should be shared across desktops, like terminals, dolphin and image browsers. I don't do menu edits but instead used wmbutton. Xscreensaver and start new session is called through wmbutton.

I'm bothered by the death of Kicker and a few problems with systray that might be fixed in E17 or by Trinity. Pidgin and other icons don't animate. That means I run kopete with OSD which is distracting and a privacy problem or I run kicker from ssh forwarded VM. I don't want to run gnome panel, cairo dock and the other gnome tied panels because they are not as well behaved as kicker.

Network issues are something of a pain and I've just about given up on anything but manual tools. I used to use and enjoy Kwavelan but it has gone away with kicker. Knetwork manager has never worked consistently for me, so I usually end up uninstalling network manager. The fall backs are wireless tools and ifconfig scripts, which work but have to be figured out for each install. My preferred home network set up is still static IPs behind a gnu/linux two nic box and dhcp no password wifi for guests.

Ultimately, I see the failure of automagic tools as a predictable result of dependence on ACPI and other hostile hardware. These will persist outside of OEM installs until Microsoft dies or architectures outside of Microsoft control gain prominence. The Windows 8 logo program shows us what we can expect x86 hardware that's even nastier in the near future.

I'd like to hear more about how dependence on ACPI has caused failure of "automagic" tools. This is new information to me.

+Will Hill, I'm curious if you've tried Openbox? My impression of some of the lesser-known lightweight WMs is that they take more geek skills to setup, whereas Openbox is relatively straightforward and well-finished. That might be just my impression.

I also like that Openbox is used in another desktop (LXDE) which means more chances for debugging and development. It doesn't have a panel or systray, but lxpanel and tint2 work fine, to name just two.

ACPI is what makes suspend and resume suck for everyone not running Windows. +Matthew Garrett has spent years of his life resolving this rubbish and bears a lot of personal responsibility for many laptops doing suspend/resume properly at all in Linux.

Personally, I still miss KDE 3. Not enough to try Trinity, though - I like recent shiny.

+Matthew Garrett, may I offer you my sincere thanks? If I had known who you were I would have sent you a fruit basket or a pint of blood or hell, whatever you want, some years ago.

The funny thing is that resume and suspend suck even worse for people running Windows.

Many thanks to +Matthew Garrett for pain and suffering endured fixing ACPI. Bill Gates personally ordered ACPI to be malicious in 1998 and I've read all sorts of horrible things since. ACPI has the ability to screw with all devices, not just power management, so I tend to blame it when my hardware is flaky. I personally avoided ACPI till 2009 by using older hardware or turning it off. Now I find hardware that won't boot at all without ACPI turned on. GNU/Linux ACPI power management has improved to the point where it is usable and works for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acpi
Gates email at http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf
text version at http://techrights.org/comes-vs-microsoft/addenda/3000/px03020.txt
This gem from second google result for "site:techrights.org acpi"
http://slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/183403

+Chris Watkins Elive and Bohndi work out of the box if you want to avoid customizing things for yourself.

http://bodhilinux.com/
http://www.elivecd.org/

Like any good tool, however, it takes some time to get used to. Enlightenment is not afraid to offer people the things they need to get work done but it does not take that much geek power to get going. Anyone that can keep a Windows box will find themselves with lots of time on their hands once they get any gnu/linux box up and use it regularly.

I described what I do with E16 here:

http://173.17.111.185/photo_album/chron/2009/2009_12_11-alt_tab_in_e16/

Things have changed since I wrote that and I've described some of my work arounds here:

http://173.17.111.185/photo_album/chron/2011/2011_07_14-kde3_vm_integration/
http://173.17.111.185/photo_album/chron/2011/2011_09_07-wmbutton_lock_and_switch_desktop/
http://173.17.111.185/photo_album/chron/2011/2011_09_12-multi_monitors_squeeze_e16/
http://173.17.111.185/photo_album/chron/2011/2011_09_07-wmbutton_lock_and_switch_desktop/

http://173.17.111.185/photo_album/chron/2011/2011_09_04-thinkpad_600_squeeze/http://173.17.111.185/photo_album/chron/2011/2011_08_19-saving_the_right_deskspace/

Thanks for the lxpanel tip but it blew up when I tried it.

I might try OpenBox again some time, but I'm generally comfortable and can't live without excellent pagers. I lay all my work out and leave it up.

It seems clear to me that we need to get together with the maker movement to create some non-crappy hardware standards, and open-source computing hardware, as well. It'll be behind the curve technologically, but then again it Won't Suck.

Lemote has hardware that can be made free from the BIOS up. RMS has one set up for himself. Perhaps other hardware makers and users will follow. The Lemote stuff is sub GHz MIPS that should be adequate for daily use but it could be better.

+Chris Watkins Xscreensaver has a blank screen and that's what I use. I use it to lock the screen when I walk away from my desk at work and when I suspend and transport my laptop. This complements full drive encryption very well. I'm aware that someone who knows what they are doing can fetch the keys from my RAM but that's not the situation I anticipate on a daily basis. Anyway, screensavers are valuable to me.

Lemote -- this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemote

Yep, that's them. See also
http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Projects/Lemote
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2010-02/msg00000.html

That takes a little more skill and time than I have for myself right now, but I can see where it will eventually be easier to do this than fool with other hardware. There are reports that some HP hardware is already a jail.

+Will Hill "Anyone that can keep a Windows box will find themselves with lots of time on their hands once they get any gnu/linux box up and use it regularly." - that hasn't been my experience at all. I've saved time in some ways since I switched in about 2006, esp malware and defrag-related. But getting stuff to work has taken a lot of time. (If I'd been living near a Linux geek friend or able to attend a LUG, things would probably be very different.)

"can't live without excellent pagers" - are they better than the pagers in other WMs? I've been happy with my multiple desktops in Openbox, switching between them with my keyboard, but maybe I'm missing something.

+Will Hill - looking at your article, I can see a couple of things that look particularly cool in E16. Openbox has edge flipping for dragging windows between desktops, but I gather E16 lets you use that method just for navigating. But your comment about maximizing windows and moving the cursor to the edge being a "bad habit" is... well, a value judgement I guess, and probably assumes I'm not on a laptop.
The ability to lay a map across several screens is pretty amazing. Moving WMs is a bigger effort than I want to make time for, but that's a feature I wouldn't mind having.

My experience with gnu/linux desktops has been like what I'm told about Unix workstations, it takes about five times as much effort to keep up a Windows box as it does a Unix box. The upfront costs of free software were steep, but I had formal but minimal Solaris instruction and one of those "Linux Unleashed" books to get me going, then a LUG and a computer club.

It helps to stick to a distribution that's stable and easy to upgrade like Debian and concentrate on getting work done instead of chasing one or two problems. The cost of using free software ten years ago was not so great audio or video media and some hardware that would not work for me. I ignored that for five or six years and still reject hardware that does not work with free software. When that gets boring, I try to do something new but it's always just a hobby. A few services and programs have gone away for me with KDE 3, so that's my current play time.

Thanks for checking out my E16 article, +Chris Watkins and sharing what you know about OpenBox. I've yet to see better pagers than those in E16 and the ability to overcome physical monitor size by laying things across multiple virtual desktops then edge flip around is awesome. E17 regresses somewhat in that but it does better with modern hardware and more recent x.org composite. The big picture is that it's all a wonderful gift.

I'm tempted to say this: Linux desktop boxes may require somewhat more maintenance than Windows desktop boxes (YMMV, depends on source, always consult your spin doctor before installing any new distro), but the problems you run into don't make you want to beat your head against a wall or strangle $founder_of_OS_company.

A good desktop is one where the problems actually make some sense (e.g. "we haven't written that yet") rather than making you shout "what the fuck" (e.g. "no, we've determined you don't really want to do stuff how you've done it for ten years, you're just wrong to want that").

I agree that you don't want to strangle anyone over things. No one is forced to use free software and it's basically a gift. That gift makes me feel good everyday. I want to hug the people who brought me E16, KDE and other great software. I'd even like to hug Dr. Matthew Garrett who called me a dick yesterday. He seemed angry and probably needs someone to tell him that everything will be OK.

How much work a gnu/linux desktop takes to keep up depends entirely on the person's needs. My wife is easy. All she wants is to browse a few web sites. I drop a version of Mepis on her laptop or desktop in 15 minutes and it works for two or three years before I have to look at it again. Mepis does an image install that preserves and uses the home partition information. It comes with non free software like Flash, so I only recommend it as an escape from completely non free software. This represents the majority of users. There are some people who love gadgets and there are some people with niche applications. I have described how I get around the vendor box problem above, but any contact with non free software multiplies free software effort and makes things difficult.

By the way, someone posted a link to a good review of ubuntu's XFCE. XFCE looks like such a winner I might have to try it out on Debian soon to see if that's where I'll be sending people with hardware too modest for newer versions of Mepis. It's probably worth putting here with a direct link.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/113579520393333767984/posts/GvCw4QJ5qwX
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/xubuntu-1110-and-my-netbook

Happy hacking.

The one major lack in XFCE, IIRC, is the lack of ability to browse Samba shares... and possibly less friendliness with mounting drives and removable storage (compared to pre-lobotomy GNOME, frex). I can check on that, though.

The review mentions a package that can be installed to browse samba shares but I only need that is silly places. I'm more interested in sftp, does it do that?

Thunar does mounted media well from what I remember. Time to check. It might be an easier way to mount files than Dolphin and KDE threw that out of Konqueror so I might as well check. Split plane mounting of samba and mounted media helps me at work, so it will be hard to replace Dolphin. Ha, thunar pulled in a panel with it's 8MB of files. Heavy start ... seems to work. Sees USB devices in the side pane. Not quite as flexible as Dolphin but maybe a little faster.

Now for xfce panel. The systray looks nice but I can do without the Win95 style "Window Buttons" to hold all my applications and it was easy to remove. Pidgin's icon did not get sucked up into systray, but was there on restart of Pidgin and blink works. If the panel is well behaved it is worth keeping for that alone. The second panel is not something I need or want and I could not figure out how to get rid of it other than making it hide. I should have started out with one blank panel and built it up. The pager, "Workplace Switcher", with all 27 of my current virtual desktops was more amusing than functional but was easy to remove. Woops, pressing the application menu made the panel vanish... Segementation fault, it's been ages since I've seen that, lol. It came back but did not find klipper, kgpg etc. So, I've removed everything but the system tray. Don't see a dictionary, function evaluator or world clock. Cool xfce4-dict has a dictionary. Don't know why that would be 2MB when everything else was 7MB.. works well. I'll have to see how well behaved this panel is over the next couple of days. If it seg faults tomorrow, I'll do without.

New release of Trinity today. 3.5.13. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAwOTk

Via Roy, https://joindiaspora.com/posts/729204

A serious question: if you don't use Samba, how do you share printers? I mean, I know there are other ways, but I haven't been able to get any of them to work.

(edit) Also, our (mine & +Harena Atria's) assessment of Dolphin was that it aspires to crapulosity. I mean, really, we couldn't figure out what it was good for that Konq couldn't do better, even with all the problems Konq has. We uninstalled it so that it would stop being the default-with-no-asking-first for mounting new media.

I don't print much but Mepis seems to have shared printers out very well the last time I had a local network with a printer on it. I think it was using cups. See the CUPS manual, here:

http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.5/sharing.html

Dolphin is actually nice but I think they should have made it into another kio for Konqueror. The containerized nature and do everything was what I loved and still love about Konqueror. Being able to open pdfs and other documents up in tabs is essential for serious research and something I miss in other browsers like Chromium Browser. I'd like to see Dolphin's preview and mounting pane show up in Konqueror when I browse local and remote file systems. It irks me that they conformed the keyboard shortcuts of Konsole with those of gnome-terminal but created another set of shortcuts for Dolphin that are different from Konqeror.

Oh well, it's all free and it mostly gets better with time.

+Will Hill - you "reject hardware that does not work with free software." If you buy a laptop, do you take your LiveCDs and just refuse to buy a laptop that you're not allowed to test-drive?

Yes, even when you've read a good review you never know what you will find in the field. Why waste hours on a difficult piece of equipment when you could have bought one that just works? CDs are reliable and easy but most computers will boot off a thumbdrive so I bring one with Debian on it if I'm buying a whole computer. If I'm buying a part, I'll bring a laptop to test it. I prefer used over new because it's cheaper, keeps things out of the landfill and mostly avoids the Microsoft tax.

Xfce4-panel survived it's first day of use and I'm probably going to keep it.

Decided to go with Linux Mint for now; review to follow after I've gotten at least a little bit caught up after a week and a half of not being able to do much of anything computer-wise.

+Anna Ominous Which Linux Mint - not the vanilla Gnome (gasp) version?

The one based on Debian Testing interests me (LMDE). I've downloaded the Xfce version, will get around to trying it sometime.

I think it must be the Gnome version -- not sure how to tell -- but it's clearly not based on iGnome (or whatever the latest version is) and it also looks like it has been substantially tweaked. The menu, for instance, has some resemblance to the new-style menus in Gnome/Unity and KDE, but without being lobotomized -- e.g. I typically see more functionality in the right-click menus than I expect.

Robert Pogson has a discussion about Samba and Microsoft's code donations to it. In comments he points out that people are better off without SMB and that the only real need for Samba is to talk to Windows clients, which he also thinks people are better off without.

http://mrpogson.com/2011/11/03/m-contributes-to-samba/

Will - SMB has one important advantage over NFS: it assumes the network is flaky, and common NFS setups don't (though they should). Also, I can't get away from Windows in my own house (the teen's gaming rig) and I'm not going to set up NFS on the 4yo's old Mac G4 to watch her DVD rips when SMB does the job just fine. I use it quite happily to access my Linux server from my Linux netbook - there's nothing wrong with it in practical terms as a protocol.

+David Gerard When setting up my media server initially, I found that NFS massively outperformed SMB when mounting a share from OpenSolaris and significantly outperformed with shares from Linux as well. If you can safely assume a stable-ish network (such as in your own LAN) I think it's a much better choice for a lot of things.

If anyone knows a good NFS tutorial, I'd be interested in reading that. Does NFS let you browse the network the way Samba does?

+Woozle IsAnAlias NFS basically lets you mount a remotely shared directory as if it was a physical volume. I don't know anything much about using it with Windows, but it is supported natively on OSX and Linux.

I understood that much. ...but does it let you browse available shares?

+Woozle IsAnAlias Not by default but you can tie it into a zeroconf daemon like avahi and announce shares with that.

Woozie - no, NFS is not discoverable out the box. You have to faff about with extra stuff to make it do that. I have never encountered an NFS setup where anyone bothered with that bit.

The essential difference is that you need to know where an NFS share is to mount it, whereas SMB announces "HI I'M A WINDOWS BOX! HI I'M A WINDOWS BOX!" on a frequent basis to the entire local network segment. (This got so annoying in one past workplace that we ended up putting the Windows PCs and the Solaris workstations on separate VLANs.)

The other problem with SMB is that it's not Solaris-friendly - Solaris can't mount SMB for arcane reasons to do with the process of writing a Solaris file system driver being so messed-up that the chances of anyone bothering are about zero. (I can't find the bug report, but it has a Solaris kernel developer detailing the process: copy'n'tweak from an existing driver.) This is alleviated by mentally consigning Solaris to a circular file labeled "ORACLE ROADKILL" the way we're doing at work right now.

I can well believe NFS gives better performance. SMB is way easier and way, way, way more common though, and - the key thing - basically works.

+David Gerard Even the support that does exist for SMB and CIFS in Solaris and Open(read: dead)Solaris is shaky. The CIFS implementation "works" but exhibits godawful performance and frequent failures.

Announcing NFS shares via Avahi does, btw, work and it's not particularly hard to set up. This article from the archlinux wiki explains pretty well:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Avahi

Windows and macs are too unfriendly and complicated to share with for me, so I don't have them at home. The kids have EEE PCs. I've got an older PowerPC iMac for my middle daughter. The software that came with it was inadequate, so I put Debian on it but I no longer have space to deploy it. My nine year old girl has a nicer Toshiba netbook with Debian. My wife uses Mepis. We use sftp and konqueror to move things around and I use X11 forwarding for systems that don't have a monitor. Wifi is not as good as wired networks.

http://173.17.111.185/photo_album/chron/2011/2011_10_25-three_system/

I also used to do entertainment like TV recording and was moving towards MythTV but don't have space and time for it now.

http://173.17.111.185/photo_album/chron/2009/2009_03_20-new_speakers_home_theater/

This G4 used to triple-boot Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS 9 and Ubuntu. It would live in Mac OS X unless I needed to burn a CD or DVD, 'cos the Ubuntu burning software worked better. I never actually booted it into OS 9 except for idle amusement. Right now it's just fine as the 4yo's telly.

If the app is still in GNOME 3, you can install it as before, though it ill of course pull in many megabytes of GNOME libs.

You should be able to launch anything that can be started as an executable from /usr/bin . If you're talking about GNOME panel apps, I have no idea if they're in that class ...