I’ve been using Kubuntu for about a year and a half, having switched over from the basic Ubuntu setup. Over that time, I’ve really come to prefer KDE over Gnome. It’s some funky shit—I dig it.

However, a few months ago, I got into Beryl and quickly became addicted to having it. My desktop is a Pentium 4 with a 128 meg Nvidia GeForce 5200 and 768 megs of RAM. As such, the addition of Beryl has made KDE programs kind of slow, clunky and prone to weirdness. My laptop hasn’t really suffered at all much as it’s much more powerful and I guess at some point I’ll slap in a new graphics card and some more RAM into my desktop, but as an experiment, I decided to try Xubuntu with its Xfce desktop environment, to see if it made any difference in performance with Beryl.

After a quick test of installing the xubuntu-desktop package onto my existing Kubuntu setup and getting promising results, I decided to clean my slate, wipe and install Xubuntu solely and see if I could survive on Xfce and Beryl, get a nice looking desktop and have everything I like about KDE, but using GTK+ alternatives. The plan was (is) to get this setup going and try it out, just on my desktop for a few months…say till the Feisty Fawn release hits and then decide, or whatever.

The results are pretty dramatic. I have almost no problems with Beryl. My desktop is lightening-fast. After some graphical tweaking, it looks pretty good so far. As far as finding alterative programs to what I was used to with KDE, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

To replace Amarok, I’ve given Exaile a try. Aiming to be a Amarok clone, but written in GTK+, I figured it would be the perfect replacement for what I’ve long considered to be the best damn music player out there. After several days of using it, I find it falls short and is a bit buggy. It does some things right like fetching album covers (though not as well as Amarok does), submitting my tracks to last.fm and all-around managing my mp3 files, which as I write this, is at 5, 307 files and climbing. However, it’s very slow to load my library, does not scan for new files (even though it’s supposed to, I have manually rescan my entire library which is slow and annoying), seemingly does not have keyboard shortcuts for controlling the player and does not integrate with my Creative Nomad mp3 player (something that more recent versions of Amarok did fairly well). But, I suppose it does the job well enough and as time progresses, it will improve.

For bittorrents, I was really into Ktorrent. I liked its plugins and it’s built-in torrent search. As the alternative, I’ve decided to go back to Azureus. It’s java, but it works well and has the plugins I like, like SafePeer.

For file browsing, while Xfce’s Thunar file manager is super fucking fast, it just can’t hold a candle to Konqueror. I miss being able to split the window, establish ssh connections, using it as a web browser and all the other goodies. It’s a hard program to top. Thunar also gets a little bitchy when it comes to dragging and dropping files. Still, it’s fast and works.

For instant messaging, making the switch from Kopete to Gaim was no big deal as I’ve used it on and off for years. Besides, as far as encryption goes, most everyone I know uses OTR and that’s one thing Kopete does not do.

For a text editor, Mousepad works fine. Normally I use VIM to edit text, so I’m not looking for any fancy, although it would be really nice if there was some syntax highlighting available.

For web browsing and email, I’m fully used to using Firefox and Thunderbird and find they both run dramatically better than when i was using them in Kubuntu. I never got much into Kmail as it didn’t seem to support having more than one SMTP server, so Thunderbird is great.

For a video player, I’m using Totem with the Xine engine. Works fine so far, but I think I liked Kaffeine better. Still I haven’t used it much, so I suppose time and the fact that there’s more than a few other players out there to give a whirl, will tell.

In regards to initial aesthetics in a fresh Xubuntu install, I hate-hate-hate the loading screen. It’s huge, it’s ugly and it’s going away as soon as I get around to making or choosing a replacement. Once loaded, everything looks good. A few minutes of changing things around and a Beryl install later, it looked much, much better. While I’m glad they’re there to have, some of the Xfce taskbar plugins leave a lot to be desired, especially the volume control.

All in all, Xfce and Xubuntu is totally doable. Whether I’ll keep it, only time will make that decision. Once Feisty rolls out, I’ll undoubtedly reinstall Kubuntu just to see the changes, but if all goes well, I just might stick with Xfce.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 6:54 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.