plqa

Who's talking about suburbs? That's still thinking in a city mindset.

I grew up in a 2500 person country side village in England. That village had everything we needed and it was only 30 minutes bus ride away from the neatest large town. It was also 45 mins train ride away from the nearest city.

I would be very sad if I had to bring my children up in these kind of living conditions. I would much prefer a nice house in an area where we can enjoy nature a little but also be close enough to a city so we can access its services.

I had a great garden as a kid and access to one of the UK"s nicest woodland areas. I would be sad to not be able to give my children the same just so they can have 'friends in the same building'.

I have a feeling that you have not and do not work on anything big or important. It's highly likely that you're still in high school OR you are in some sort of college / University.

I never claimed it didn't work. I claimed the UI was bulky. Try having to work with 20 projects folders with millions of .java files and constantly having to sideways scroll.

I like things small. My work iMac running OSX makes everything very small. Your comment doesn't really relate to my problems. I need things in Linux to be smaller and more compact. Even with your 1280 x 1024 resolutions screens, everything is still too big, clunky and difficult to use.

Also, I'm using a laptop for my Linux install, there is no scope for an external monitor. The requirements really are quite simple. A UI that isn't bulky.

I'm not really bothered with trying to make it look like OSX> I just want a more compact UI and I want Eclipse to be more compact so it's actually a joy to use rather than a pain.

I tried several themes before but got nowhere. I'll probably give some more themes a try.

I've used Ubuntu extensively. I don't mind using Unity but you can't get around the fact that on a standard 15.x inch laptop screen that it looks really nasty, nothing is compact, everything is bulky, the borders are thick and the default fonts are very large. It doesn't feel nice to work with a UI that is an eyesore and clunky and so big to the point where things just don't fit on the screen.

I need to use Eclipse, this is what I use for my Java work, the platform I am working on has been painstakingly configured to work nicely with Eclipse and I won't be considering a change of IDE. I already use VIM for my C and Python work.

Eclipse and a more compact interface are my two overriding requirements in a Linux distribution. Without these things I can't consider moving away from OSX.

Any suggestions?

I'd love to hear some suggestions. I'm annoyed that I've spent time with OSX so now I expect a beautiful desktop and applications ;-)