Merry Christmas to all. Thanks to everyone who has persevered with my often ridiculous and obvious pleas for help.
A big thanks to Mark for your patience! 
I hope you have a great festive period. I’m off to London for the week for a break, when I come back I think I’ll bite the bullet and install Ubuntu 11.10 now all of you seem to have tested it for me. 
Enjoy your trip, and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy new year too.
I’m loving 11.10 with the Gnome 3 desktop … didn’t think I would at first, but now I’d recommend it.
Mad Penguin says the Server edition isn’t a clever idea, but the Desktop edition (at least once you’ve installed gnome-shell) is great.
Anywho … have fun, and catch you when you return …
Mmm, server edition could seriously spoil your Christmas if you’re an advanced user, they (Debian!) changed the way that low-level networking is handled and switched from “ifconfig” to “ip”, unfortunately they did it badly and didn’t test it properly.
As a result they have all sorts of problems with things like VLAN’s, Bridges and Aliases, and these are just the problems “I’ve” found (note there are all recorded issues that other people have also found).
11.10 Workstation, yup, works fine … wouldn’t recommend Unity really, I’m using Gnome shell … however (!) … on balance, if I had the option I’d switch back to the Gnome-2 way of working. I think that “concept” and “Apple envy” has managed to get in the way of functionality. There are some nice concepts, BUT, developers, I still want to be able to;
a. See what programs I have running (WTF!)
b. Have a visible tooltray, not an unpredictable ghost that appears sometimes if I move the mouse in the right way
c. Have a menu with a list of available programs on it that I can launch from
What I can live without;
a. A screen lock feature which “sometimes” doesn’t present a password box when you come back to the machine after the screen has gone to sleep
b. A virtual screen switcher that doesn’t seem to understand more than one screen
c. Switch between applications without activating an expensive GL operation to zoom out and in
d. Having to load in “required” or at least “expected” features via wobbly development sites
… Can anyone explain to me what was so fundamentally “wrong” with the Gnome-2 interface? The fundamental principle if the UI may have been one of the only things M$ actually got right over the last 20 years - why change it? Yes Apple’s interface is funky, yes Apple is selling well, but have you ever done tech support for an Apple user and tried to get them to do stuff that goes beyond running email or a browser? It takes forever!
I can see why Linus threw a wobbler over Gnome-3, does anyone have any feedback on Xfce, I am rather tempted to try it …
– Oh, yes, by the way, Merry Christmas!! ;D
I had a quick look at Xubuntu 11.10 and wasn’t impressed at all … it was a quick look so it was a “general feeling” kind of dislike, so maybe it would grow on me once “tweaked” to my needs, but by default it had a ‘Docky’ style dock at the bottom which seemed to crash every ten minutes and I didn’t really spot anything that LXDE didn’t seem to do better … though it must be said my experience of LXDE is only in PeppermintOS (Two) which is based on Ubuntu 11.04.
So until I play a bit more with Xfce, I’d be more likely from personal experience to recommend LXDE … that said I’d feel uneasy attempting to recommend anything to someone that knows more about these things than I