OK, over recent days I’ve been installing a few too many meta-packages that then install 50+ applications. the last straw to this was earlier this week, when I installed an ubuntu studio package with the hopes of finding a bit of dual channel audio recording software that runs well, unfortunately it also installed around 40 other applications, so I decided to reinstall.
Having tried a few different distros in virtual boxes previously I’d decided I fancied taking XFCE into a slightly more mainstream roll for myself, and so I installed Xubuntu(sticking with ubuntu at the moment, since I like the apt package manager, and I still can’t get debian working in a virtualbox) over my current windows partition(which hasn’t been used in almost a year anyway), so I could switch back without losing anything. And now for the list of what I liked and didn’t like, this is a personal list, so you personally may or may not appreciate these features.
LOVED:
- quick – I have yet to profile my boot sequence, but my boot is already very fast, taking around 15 seconds to boot.
- small footprint – it’s currently using a whole 13MB of ram, nothing massive
- shading – I can keep a window on my deskop without having the full window open, very impressive
- margins – adding a margin to the desktop let’s me decide how large a window should be when maximised, doesn’t sound impressive, but I love it.
- panels – unlike with gnome and KDE(from what I’ve seen) panels no longer have to be the full length/height of the desktop, again, doesn’t sound great, but
- right click = menu, middle click = workspace list+window switcher – yes, with the gap between your panels or margins on the screen you can now access the menu, just perfect for saving panel space(I’ve now only got one panel instead of two, and I’ve still got lots of spare space)
- mounting drives is easier – the panel applet to let you mount and unmount drives works, unlike with ubuntu, so it’s not much easier to mount or unmount drives
on the other hand these are the things I’m not big fans of:
- wine doesn’t work for me now – yeah, wine looks really bad, not sure if this is the latest release candidate(released this morning just before I installed Xubuntu) causing the problem or XFCE’s problem, I’ll find out later on today and update this accordingly
- erm… that’s about it…
EDIT: OK, results are in, XFCE is the problem, which is a shame, since I cannot live without wine at the moment. I’ve gone back to standard gnome for now, and with any luck I can try to find a method of getting wine to work correctly under XFCE.
