OK WTF? Just upgraded from 11.04 with the classic desktop. Two simple questions...

1. How do I kill Unity? I hate it. Seriously; what's the point? It's just bigger and uglier and less efficient. Maybe a good idea on a netbook, but not on a 24" screen.

2. Where the hell are my hard disks now! The system menu has vanished, I can't find the disk utility and none of my drives are mounted. I have 2TB of data simply not there any more... media and mnt are empty and I don't know where else to look.

I expect I'm being thick, but any pointers would be appreciated.

On the plus side, it's using a fraction of the swap it did before. Maybe that's just because it's the first reboot in months though

OK found disk utility by typing it into the search box on "Dash". At least I have my data back, although I still can't find the system menu... or the application menus... or any of my lovingly placed shortcuts.

Everything Gnome based (i.e. everything on a Gnome toolbar) is gone.

Although I do like Unity, the way they've just switched people over with no transition is a bit MSish, IMO.

It's broken my remote access too - NX doesn't bring up the dock, so if you ever get to run anything it totally vanishes when you minimise it. I guess the next release will fix it, but the help at the moment is slightly farcical!

I'm thinking of going Kubuntu, but it's a pain because I've spent ages installing stuff on there...

Just install & use Gnome. It's easy. Google is your friend.

Yeah I've found that now, thanks. I didn't really get that Unity was a replacement for Gnome - I thought it was just window dressing.

Yep - Unity is okay-ish, but it's just not ready for prime-time.

Xfce for teh Win!

*installs*

Ooh, that's a lot cleaner looking. We'll see how I get on with this

I think I'm sticking with Xfce. It does everything I want, and it does it well. I even really like the "Thunar" file manager

Been playing around and you wouldn't recognise it now. I've just got a single vertical panel on the side, so I have the full vertical height of the monitor usable. I did toy with not having any panel at all - you can do everything from the middle mouse click anyway! Finally, a desktop environment that doesn't get in the way

Snap!

I've turned autohide off for this piccy:

OK here's a weird one - I opened Nautilus and it killed my Xfce desktop. I didn't actually intend to open it, but it was still the default application for opening folders...

I still have my panel, but the desktop background has gone back to the one I had under Unity, my desktop icons have vanished and the click-menus are gone too. This despite my desktop settings still showing correctly. I'm sure if I log off and back on it'll be fine again, but I really wasn't expecting that.

I don't really want to do a clean Xubuntu install, but it looks like it might be the easier option. Took me ages to get Apache / php set up the way I wanted last time, so the web server will be off-line for quite a while. Also took quite a while to get all the Android tools set up, and some other stuff I'll remember when it's not there.

*logs off-and-on again*

Try this page:

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/purexfce

Thanks, I'll check it out tomorrow.