Xubuntu Linux
I've been trying out Xubuntu (a slightly lighter version of Ubuntu with the XFCE window manager) on percheron recently.
I wound up re-partitioning percheron such that I could install Xubuntu, Wolvix, and FreeBSD on it. Right now, only Xubuntu is installed. The install itself was as smooth as Ubuntu advocates claim. It was a bit strange not seeing much text go by and it is strange to me to not see boot text when things are starting up.
One thing that struck me as strange is that there is both an 'Add/Remove Programs' menu entry and a Synaptic menu entry. Add/Remove seems to be a simplified set of things that should take care of the so-called average user. Synaptic allows the same things, and more, in perhaps finer detail. Synaptic is as advertised: nearly painless program installation and decent dependency checking. As shipped (downloaded) Synaptic is a bit limited. Using the menu entry 'Software Sources' and enabling other sources makes a lot more easily available. I only had difficulty when Audacity wanted libmp3lame.so and I couldn't readily find it. It was there, just not by itself and not in what I expected it to be. It was in lame-dev rather than lame. Dealing with mp3 encoding was the only time I was cussing Ubuntu's Debian ancestry. That might not be fair, as Fedora is similarly goofy about mp3 encoding.
I also installed Opera by downloading it from the Opera web site and double-clicking on the package in Thunar (the XFCE file manager). That worked out well.
I copied over a few settings directories and files from belgian and had things pretty much to my liking. That took a bit as gftp seems prone to crashing. I've seen that on other distributions, so it may be time to consider another FTP program rather than blame Xubuntu for the problem.
That cannot be said of whatever Xubuntu did to make Nedit not work. I installed Nedit via Synaptic. I reinstalled via Synaptic. I went to the Nedit web site and got their binaries. They all crashed on startup. I know it's not Nedit being screwy. It's Xubuntu being weird about something. A Google search yielded a work-around for just starting Nedit alone. That didn't work as intended when I tried to use Nedit as Opera's source viewer. I wound up resorting to a short bash script that Opera can call to invoke Nedit with the work-around. It was a bit disappointing and annoying to have to do that when the distribution's claim to fame is ease of use with things just working. It was then that I was glad for my experience with other distributions, the Slackware derivatives in particular. I was also a bit surprised not to find an entry for Nedit in the menu after the install. That isn't a big deal as I start Nedit either by quicklaunch button or from Opera.
I did find I got used to not having root as such exist. There is no logging in as root and there is no using su to become root. There is only sudo, which is not at all the same. It's not bad, and I found I did get used to it fairly quickly. It still feels odd, but it doesn't annoy me.
Will I switch from Fedora to an Ubuntu-variant? Probably, but not immediately. I expect I'll give it a 'test drive' for some time, and then likely, though not certainly, switch not to Xubuntu or Kubuntu (and certainly not plain Ubuntu - I have no intention of putting up with Gnome as a Window Manager) but to an Ubuntu-based FreeSpire. That is coming, probably sometime later in the Spring, and will let me bypass a bunch of codec silliness.