"In this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly, a new Ubuntu derivative called Gnubuntu is mentioned. A little earlier in the announcement a reference to Xubuntu is given. Xubuntu is news to me! I just had to try it. I headed over to the Xubuntu site to figure this thing out. Their Introduction statements is as follows: "The aim of the Xubuntu community project is to provide a nice Ubuntu desktop experience by using Xfce4 as the desktop environment and GTK+ 2 applications wherever possible."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:"most of the people choosing to use Xfce are trying to avoid a feature-rich (I'm purposely avoiding the word "bloated") DE."
No, I don't avoid Gnome because it's 'feature-rich', I avoid it because it is bloated :-) Gnome coders are working to rip out the cruft, which is good, but you can't deny it's there. As an example, a Gnome coder recently discovered that the desktop parsed an entire 300K XML file just to set the volume! (And that file had already been parsed elsewhere before.)
Gnome is quite nice, but there's lots of cruft, bloat and overengineering like throughout the desktop. So those of us using Xfce don't have some deluded vision of 'feature-rich' software -- we've just seen too much half-baked code and like things to be done a little more carefully :-)
Member since:
2005-07-13
I'm all for choice, but really, if you want to try Xfce, there's nothing stopping you apt-getting it through Synaptic on a regular Ubuntu system.
This ?buntu distro splitting by 2nd and 3rd parties does nothing for Ubuntu, Ubuntu has the potential makings of an almost consistent platform and slightly less a complete random bag of packages smished together. This brand-dividing doesn't help.
I'm not a big fan of Xfce, don't think there's anything wrong with it, it's just not my cup of tea. But from what I've seen, most of the people choosing to use Xfce are trying to avoid a feature-rich (I'm purposely avoiding the word "bloated") DE.
Seems counter productive to force someone to install a gnome- (or kde-) based distro in order to use their DE of choice. This approach also seems a little more in line with Ubuntu's "philosophy" of accessibility and meeting user's needs rather than the other way around.
Besides, it's community driven, the way Kubuntu was before Mark had his rapture. It's not taking any resources away from the other *buntus.
Just my 2c...