I appreciate that Linux and LMDE in particular cater to a more "adventurous" crowd, who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. I appreciate that Gnome3/Unity etc. is trying to do something forward-thinking with the form factors now available (netbooks etc.). That said, I am quickly losing confidence in LMDE. I've had nothing but problems since installing.
- The boot partition options during install were difficult to decipher, and I ended up using the older more reliable deep menu to configure my partitions
- The delete key doesn't work by default in Nautilus, and to enable it required a gconf configuration change (more of a Gnome3 thing, but still related)
- Multiple monitor support is terrible, I've had to revert to using the most basic default setup and can't change which monitor is the primary (I've searched the threads on this): this causes unrecoverable errors that no amount of reboots, shutdowns, or log outs will resolve
- Multiple times I've had my computer shut down on me with no warning or cause given, both while I'm in the middle of using it as well as when I'm not around
Since I was introduced to *nix years and years ago I fell in love, teaching myself admin stuff, CLI operations, differences between the various distributions and DEs etc. It was glorious. I felt so empowered by my choice of OS and I could accomplish things so fast with built-in utilities, or if it wasn't built in I could build it or quickly get it.
Then one summer I was too busy exploring and just having fun, and life happened so I didn't devote as much time as I liked to upkeep. Now I have some time again, and when I return to my comfort zone I find that it has all been ripped apart and reassembled like Frankenstein's monster: it's still made from the components of Linux, all the DEs and Debian that I knew, but put together in a horrific semblance of the originals. Nothing works quite right, but most of it works passably; some things are simply unusable.
The ability to tweak, maintain, automate, and share your OS makes it intimately personal. These are all great things (but not all of them) that I feel are being constrained in the current design.
I want to love it. I want to be able to brag to my friends "hey, look what I can do!" or "look at this awesome feature of my OS!". Unfortunately, I feel like a complete newbie fumbling around where I used to feel like a poweruser. What happened?