Ah, I can relax now. I’m back home, and it’s as warm, cozy, familiar, and easy as I remember. And the neighborhood is lovely, upscale but not snobby and uptight.
Home is Xubuntu, of course. I’ve been away a long time! But this is just exactly the way I remember my home distro, except that it seems a little slower than before. That might be just because the last time I was here was before systemd and all that extra junk was foisted on users. But I think I can speed things up a bit with the usual little things, like turning off services I don’t use, adjusting the “swappiness,” maybe going back to Seamonkey instead of the usual separate Firefox and Thunderbird applications.
This time instead of the usual Xfce panel with launchers on the bottom, I thought I’d throw a liiiiiiiiittle bit of eye candy in, so there’s Cairo Dock with weather applet, analog clock applet, and silly bouncing effects when you mouse over them and click them. Yet it’s lightweight, and just prettier than a plain ol’ Xfce panel. And I like that 3D shelf thing.
Lots less bloat than Linux Lite, and all I added was Synaptic Package Manager, because it’s what I’m used to and I think it’s better than “Software Center.” I added SystemBack and MintStick, just because they’re super-simple graphical tools for formatting and writing images to a USB drive, creating restore points and allowing me to make a bootable and installable copy of my installed system and write it to a pendrive. All done in under 40 minutes. On Debian this would have taken me a few days!
But this is Xubuntu. Almost perfect as-is, right out of the box, saving me lots of work and letting me get right to work, doing what I love.
Robin's Rants and Raves 
🙂 Not bad at all, Robin.
I love your personal touch that you made to Xubuntu.
LikeLike
Xubuntu is a good distro that has a lot of flexibility to it. Good stuff.
LikeLike
It’s soooo much easier than “straight Debian with Xfce,” which is supposed ton be faster. It’s not faster. Not even MX-Linux with it’s custom kernel and cool tools is as nimble as Xubuntu. Whatever it is that Canonical does to the kernel and the firmware, it always “just works” and flies faster than Debian ever did. Debian + Xfce took weeks of trial and error to get configured the way I want, boot up the way I want, and behave the way I want. Xubu does all that almost right out of the box! Minutes instead of months to set up and get going.
LikeLike