Hi Paul, > I have been in search of a distro that does not have the Ubuntu 12.10 > Unity Dash spyware. You could try any of the FSF recommended distros: http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html gNewSense is quite similar to the (pre-Unity) Ubuntu, and I've heard very good things about Trisquel as well, which is KDE based. -Max