I'm feeling spoiled. After years of enduring one questionable Microsoft UI decision after another, I'm having a blast tweaking and re-skinning gnome under Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon.” To be sure, it's a buggy process. I've crashed X a few times and left myself with a hung shell on more than one occasion (had to jump out to the terminal and do a forced shutdown via CTRL-ALT-DEL). And I've also had my share of appl I’m feeling spoiled. After years of enduring one questionable Microsoft UI decision after another, I’m having a blast tweaking and re-skinning gnome under Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon.” To be sure, it’s a buggy process. I’ve crashed X a few times and left myself with a hung shell on more than one occasion (had to jump out to the terminal and do a forced shutdown via CTRL-ALT-DEL). And I’ve also had my share of application weirdness (OpenOffice tends to choke on certain “incomplete” themes).However, the reward is worth it: I now have a nice, pseudo-Mac OS X-ish UI (via the “Brushed” theme from www.gnome-look.org) with a nice, funky icon set (Dropline Neu!). Here’s a link to a screenshot I took of my desktop:https://www.xpnet.com/screenshot.jpg I’ve also figured out how to arrange my workspaces to best suit my needs. For example, I moved the default panel with menu bar to the bottom of the screen and added the “task bar” option (old habits die hard). I also added a second panel to the right side of the screen and cranked-up the icon size to 48. This is my new “quick links” replacement. Finally, I’ve got my common applications – Evolution, OpenOffice Writer (which I’m using right now), VirtualBox and a terminal window running Axel (a nifty command-line download accelerator) spread out across 4 workspaces to help keep the clutter down (no more hunting for that hidden window).Overall, things are proceeding better than expected. My only remaining gripe is that I experience some random flickering of the display from time to time. Not sure what’s causing this – I’m running with the bundled nVidia drivers so perhaps its just some general “bugginess.” I’ll try grabbing the latest and greatest via “envy” and see if that doesn’t clear it up.I also need to figure out how to master sbackup. So far, it looks like its working. I’ve got a nice 8GB+ .tgz file sitting on an external disk, and when I went to restore a file it seemed to work. However, the restore UI does seem a bit buggy – the main sbackup window goes dark and I’m presented with a nondescript, empty dialog window – and the process takes forever to restore a single file. Still, it’s better than nothing. So, after less than two days of living under Ubuntu I’ve got my day-to-day environment set-up and I’m ready to get to work. And not only am I surviving the ordeal, I’m actually starting to enjoy my new digs (that multi-desktop cube “thingy” is quite addictive). Next Up: Completing my first live project under “Gutsy.” Stay tuned… Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business