After installing Ubuntu and completely removing Unity in favor of the standard Gnome3 desktop, I found Gnome to be not so much to my liking. But there is a great resource available to those who have installed one of the flavors of Ubuntu (Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu). With one big honkin’ command, you can switch from one of those flavors to the other. And this site provides the necessary stuff.
So… not liking Gnome3 that much? Just issue this one big command string and walla! You’re now running Xubuntu! Yes, that is exactly what I did. Worked peachy. And it was almost entirely painless. It’s really just a matter of removing some packages and installing others. All the underlying configuration stays put. All I really had to do is setup the Xfce panels the way I wanted them.
See the big problem I’m having is that there are just far too many choices in the Linux world… and they’re all FREE. So there is no limit to the things one can try. It only costs time. Could be it’s time to just leave things alone for awhile and use my time for something else.
Now that I’m back on Ubuntu I’m starting to read all these things about Canonical trying to force their own display server (Mir) on the rest of the Linux community. The problem is, because Canonical produces the most popular Linux distribution (Ubuntu), they probably have more leverage than they should on the direction of Linux as a whole. The Linux community is already fragmented enough without this kind of bullying.
But it makes me want to stay far away from Ubuntu and it’s derivatives (now that I have just installed one). Gah! I just can’t win. Although I have no compelling reason to make a hasty decision (and spend more time distro-hopping). I’m sure what I have installed will work well for me for several years, if I want it to. And it will be officially supported until April 2015.