K.Mandla

Linux Mint does this on their LMDE version. A rolling release will mean that Canonical must provide an easy way to rollback to previous package versions or to save snapshots of the user's machine before upgrading. You can't expect that an Ubuntu end-user to have the same technical knowledge as someone with experience with Debian, Gentoo or the BSDs to troubleshoot when suddenly their computer is not booting and that they need to change run levels or disable their display manager to figure out what's wrong with Xorg. Shit happens, and happens often.

Also, I've used Archlinux (now Debian sid recently with their systemd "upgrade" and other desicions that deviate away from their KISS principle) and haven't experienced any problem, then again I tend to run a maximalist[1] desktop. Stuff starts to break when you have a lot of applications installed with their own dependencies and their own team of people working on that application, I've always felt that the whole desktop environment on Linux is like building a tower with cubes, it's solid when you have a few applications, but as you start adding stuff on top, the whole things starts trembling away and it takes a really small problem to bring everything down.

If this is going to be done, they better provide ways to their users to easily recover from an upgrade gone wrong.

[1] - Maximailism is a better word: http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/maximalism-is-a-better-word/

There's also Teapot, with FLTK or ncurses-based UI: https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/how-to-use-teapot-like-a-pro/

Archived homepage of the project: https://web.archive.org/web/20211124073408/https://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/

Its most relevant feature seems to be 3-dimensional tables. From the home page: "Instead of the unflexible and complicated syntax used to address the values of cells in traditional spread sheets ("B1" or "R1C2"), teapot uses for a more functional approach: "@(1,2,0)". This results in an easily understandable syntax and despite the very few basic functions, very powerful semantics."

Haven't used it myself but I was quite curious about it a few years ago.

EDIT: Has anybody succeeded in entirely replacing his/her spreadsheet needs with e.g. awk scripts? Seems like a nice exercise in the "first simplify your data structures, then analyze" paradigm.

This with WINE is what I think is the perfect combination of GUI and CLI... but as a long-time Windows user, several things stood out and made it look slightly off:

the menu bar and padding around the icon labels is too tall
the window borders are slightly too wide (compared to the default)
scrollbar buttons shouldn't disable at end of travel
sort direction indicator in header control (which first appeared in Win2k) should be a grey triangle, not a black arrow
"KiB" and "GiB"
font has some weird keming in some places

Nonetheless, this is a lot closer lookalike than some of the others I've seen, such as this one:

https://kmandla.wordpress.com/projects/lookalike-windows-xp-classic/

glances is nice if you want to get an overview of your system resources:

https://github.com/nicolargo/glances

bmon and iftop can be used to see network usage:

https://github.com/tgraf/bmon/

http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/iftop/

Similar to iftop there is also iotop, but instead of showing network usage, it shows disk usage:

http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/

Side note: There was a blog a couple years ago, which isn't being updated now, that would post reviews of CLI tools. Anyone that is interested in this topic should take a look at it:

https://kmandla.wordpress.com/software/

https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/ (new blog from the same person that did http://kmandla.wordpress.com)