On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 10:29:03PM +0100, James Freer wrote:
On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Tony tony@ttiger.co.uk wrote:
For me I think Ubuntu are losing direction a little bit. Ubuntu is becoming "bloat ware", not performing very well on older PC's and in some cases either refusing to install or an upgrade to the latest version caused major problems as support for older PC's is being withdrawn... Ubuntu does give the options with their Alternative Installs but Mint doesn't.
I felt Ubuntu was losing direction a while back and i switched to Xubuntu. Mainly because i like the minimal approach and i add to that. In ubuntu i was removing as well as adding - didn't seem quite the right approach.
I've used xubuntu for a long time, came from Slackware via Red Hat (as it was then). Having come from a Unix command line developement background I find it closer to my 'roots'.
I did look at Mint but again i was interested in the minimalist approach i.e. xfce - however, the maintainer's wife had a serious condition and there was no one to take over the maintenance for a while. As Wayne said once don't swop distros too much but get to know one really well.
It must be 18 months now that i've been using xubuntu and i must say it's grown on me - i haven't looked at Ubuntu even though i've got a new machine which could easily cope with it. I think Canonical have stretched themselves too much - there are so many releases now and each six monthly... a lot of work which means something has to give or the ubuntu world is getting more interesting. I still think it's the best distro but xubuntu is becoming more established... each release just steady improvements and that seems to be the way they'll keep it. Stability i feel is the key with linux.
One minor problem with xubuntu is that it's sometimes difficult to work out how workarounds/fixes for ubuntu can be implemented on xubuntu. However it is now more within the ubuntu family and I think this is less true than it was.