I have just installed Xubuntu 23.04 (minimal edition) and removed the snaps. I forgot how fast and nice Xfce actually is. I really like using it, coming from a window manager and Arch. The only downside that I found is the Ubuntu repos; yes, they have most stuff but they’re just old (even on 23.04). I hope I won’t feel the need to distro-hop anymore. I just wanted to share my positive experience with yall because I don’t think Xubuntu gets any attention. :D
I’ve found that adding flatpak and flathub solves the old packages on Ubuntu based distributions for me, at least for the most part. It obviously doesn’t really work for cli stuff but then the only cli app I regularly use is yt-dlp and I install that via pip
I agree and also use flatpak for many apps because they work on many distros. Flatpak works even on distros like NixOS that does not adhere to the fhs and alpine that doesn’t use the GNU coreutils.
Distrobox or Nix are great for cli stuff, since they allow package installation independent of the system package manager.
These tools makes using any distro mostly the same.
i hopped from arch/wm to xub too. tbh everything i learned from setting up awesome, qtile, open box etc helped me get really into the functionality of xfwm and make it really work for me. it’s a little sluggish, but only compared to a completely bare bones wm. the distro hopping phase was a valuable learning experience, but i think this is a perfectly fine place to settle down.
i’ve been curious about the minimal edition. now that i’ve found replacements and workarounds in the ubuntu repos, i’ve been wanted to do a fresh install with that. i’ve got ~3100 packages just from trying stuff out and forgetting to uninstall it haha.
The minimal edition is nice but u need to install everything urself not even mousepad (text editor) or a browser is preinstalled 💀
I started using Xfce out of necessity, where Ubuntu with Gnome would take 5~10 minutes to boot up on my old computer, while Xubuntu and Mint Xfce would take no more than 1 minute and 20 seconds (this being in the past 1~2 years).
Now that I finally got a new computer (the old one was working overtime, poor thing), despite being a big leap, I still see myself installing Xfce systems out of habit (but hey, at least optimization is a good habit to have =D ).
