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Comment by lhnn | Hacker News Reader

Everyone has their own preferred setup, and that's great! It's part of what makes FOSS great: Your choice.

My choice is Xubuntu. I've been using Xubuntu on my laptop for the past 6 months, and the 12.10 beta for the past two.

The link below is my tasklist after install to really make Xubuntu shine. Oh! And now with updates to the Ubiquity installer, FDE can be done with the GUI instead of fiddling with the debian-installer text partitioner!

http://wiki.cyberfoxfire.com/wiki/doku.php?id=tech:xubuntu_t...

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I was so fond of Ubuntu before they introduced Unity or Gnome 3. It was so responsive, easy enough for a beginner, yet it was not in the way for an expert user (apart for the lack of regex in the default editor, perhaps). I tried Xubuntu, Kubuntu and other distros, but I kept going back to the default Ubuntu one. I used it as my only OS for years, but now sadly it's the opposite and I boot it only when I need it.

I guess I should give up trying to like Ubuntu and start using XFCE instead. Thank you for your list, I will use it to check this desktop environment.

I'm the opposite. I' used XFCE for a decade and stuck by it because it felt familiar... it felt like home. With the release of 12.04, I switched to vanilla Ubuntu because I feel that will be what I see the most in the tech industry and I wanted to get use to it.

It took about 2 days to get used to it, but now I find myself super+(search term) for everything instead of trying to find stuff in an applications list and that spilled over to my Win7 use also.

I still miss a few functionalities, mainly right-click->open terminal here, but I find myself reaching for my mouse MUCH less and I'm not wasting time trying to find something buried in a list or folder somewhere. Search is FAST (on both platforms).

install nautilus-open-terminal.

Wow. That should be default. I obviously never even tried to google the issue. THANKS!

...now I just need to figure out how to make nautilus-open-terminal open a guake terminal tab instead and I'm in UI nirvana (too bad it's probably gonna take 4+ hrs X( )

This might help: http://askubuntu.com/questions/70540/how-can-i-set-default-t...

you can just install gnome-do on Xubuntu and you'll have the same search based workflow in the interface you're used to and the Ubuntu base below.

I TRIED to like Ubuntu's Unity, but the fact that I can't either: (a) right click things like panels and choose 'configure' or 'properties' and adjust everything to my liking [the Windows way, that I still prefer] or (b) have a goddamn' config/settings center where I can actually adjust the UI settings I care of [the KDE and Xfce way that works...] ...I mean, I still don't know how to disable window grouping for the damn "taskbar"

Yes, that's fine and all, but Xubuntu no longer (for me) has the lightweight advantage that it once had over Ubuntu and I have seen (again, personally) significant performance gains from Ubuntu OVER Xubuntu. Once you have to start installing GTK and KDE toolkits just to be productive on Xubuntu, it becomes quite heavy.

With Xubuntu, you don't need gnome-do. Its appfinder is (almost) as good. Just hit Win+R to get to it.

Yeah, Xfce is great. I don't know why more people who keep bitching about Unity and Gnome 3 don't just switch to Xfce. It's a solid DE that doesn't pull the rug out from under you on a whim because the devs decided they wanted to copy Apple.

Thanks for this. I have been on the lookout for a lightweight OS like Crunchbag to upgrade my desktop from Ubuntu 10.10. Being a intermediate user, I do not want a lot of bells and whistles but appreciate a more responsive system. I manage a lot of Ubuntu servers so I would prefer an Ubuntu development environment as well. In fact, I am seriously considering using a virtual machine for this purpose.

If you want responsiveness, check out openbox. For intermediate users, the setup isn't difficult.

Lubuntu is also worth checking out.

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