I did not dismiss Mate. I said that it had problems. I urged it to be tried
on Mint 12 and asked for a review.

I have not tried it. I was going by the Mint RC feedback which varied from
bad to very bad. Many people who tried it said that it was not ready and
some said it was unusable. It is good to hear a positive report.

In the Mint 12 RC MATE wasn't available for the first few days after the
release. When it first came as an update to the RC is was very unimpressive and
unfinished. With further updates to the RC it got better, sound control was
added, the Mint menu was added so that by the time of the Mint 12 stable release
MATE was usable. But it needs polish and it is getting work done on it. Right
now it needs power management available on the panel, and it could use some
polish regarding font rendering. But as of right now it is usable, and I can see
it getting much better.
It is a shame that Gnome is going to do away with Gnome Classic/Fallback
eventually, because that is really the best option for those who want a Gnome 2
interface, or as close as you can get to Gnome 2. With alt-right click on the
panel you can move the panel, delete a panel and just use one panel, move the
panel around, and easily add apps to it. I think if Gnome left the Fallback
option available there would not be as much angst toward them.
I honestly don't know what some of these devs are thinking. No one who
actually does work on a computer can fully substitute that with a tablet, and a
tablet interface just does not cut it for many who work on their computers
rather than just surf the web. Thankfully we do have options and choices in
Linux.

Too bad I couldn't get Mint 12 to install, Kubuntu 11.10, nor Mandriva. OpenSuse
Gnome said Gnome 3 failed, and was running in fall back mode on the Live CD, but
it installed in KDE, but I hope I find something else since I can't even get the
time set from the Internet.
To me this isn't ancient hardware, it's a dual-Opteron AMD server motherboard
and the VGA card is nVidia 128-MB. Funny Kubuntu 11.10 worked with the Live CD
with a 64-MB nVidia card. Ugh, why do they make it so difficult sometime?
I'll swap out the hard drive and try a net install of Debian next, I'm afraid
Fedora would be like OpenSuse. Well the 64-bit Zorin gave 3-D effects from the
Live CD.
Any others working with old server boards as Linux workstations or desktops
these days?

Distros can be temperamental to install. I have to jump through more hoops
with some. In recent days I have installed both OpenSuSE 12 and Mandriva
2011 and neither would install from usb key using UNetbootin. I burned RW
DVDs and they installed, but grub would not work for either, so I have only
used them from the Live disk. Both use grub legacy. Neither picked up other
installed distros that use grub2 and the grub2 distros pick up the
installations that use grub legacy, but they will not boot. I have not
encountered this problem before and am still working on it.

A nice thing about OpenSuSE is Tumbleweed which effectively makes it a
rolling release. I have to get SusE to work to try that out!

Fedora 16 installed without a hitch and I used it for about a week. Great
distro if you do not mind tinkering to get things to work as well as in
Kubuntu. There are some great online guides.

Next on my list is Mint 12 and perhaps Arch which I have
only previously installed in a VM.

I just switched from Ubuntu 10.04 to Mint Linux 11 to try out. I like it
better than
10.04 for a couple of reasons. It seems to be faster in connection to my
Wifi,
and just faster in general. I still haven't seen how well the sound
works in all
aspects. The sound works as well as 10.04 did on internal speakers,
still need to
test with headphones, 10.04 didn't work with headphones, if Mint doesn't
either
I do have the work around I had with 10.04 to fall back on.

My main reason to change was knowing that the next LTS would have the
new Unity
in I wanted to try something more in keeping with 10.04. I am glad I
switched. I had
tried Mint 8 some time ago, then Mint 9 and didn't see much to make me
change. Then
read some nice reviews on 11 and some plans for 12, so I may try the
live when it settles
down.

Glad it worked out for you. I is good to have reviews from users and the
reasons why it is good or not. Which DE are you using, MGSE, GNOME Shell or
Mate?

I will give it a spin sometime soon. It won't replace anything as my
Kubuntu installation is complicated and I like it that way. But it will
find a home one one of my many partitions.

The Gnome web site offers a download, which happens to be OpenSuse. When I
installed it as the third OS on my laptop, I told it not to install Grub. It
whined, but accepted my decision. Then I booted Ubuntu and told it to sudo
update-grub, and it picked up the OpenSuse installation just fine.

Since then, I replaced OpenSuse with Kubuntu 11.10.

I think the reason why GNOME did not make the GNOME Classic a fallback is
they did not want to compete with GNOME Shell which they hope people adopt.
The what-if-you -had-a-party-and-nobody-came syndrome. :) Also they wanted
throw all of their resources behind the Shell. Apparently there was some
push by developers chiefly from Redhat to keep GNOME classic, but they
worked on GNOME Shell against their better instinct because that is the way
RH operates. They respect downstream and go with the flow.