Several installs over the last couple of years revealed a number of minor problems on different laptops but I now have a fully working Xubuntu 13.04 on my newish desktop PC. It may only be a development version of Xubuntu's latest offering but it's working extremely well.

I'm probably going to dual boot between Kubuntu and Xubuntu for the time being as the latest Kubuntu development release has a few problems running GTK applications such as Emacs. Firefox and Thunderbird freeze frequently. Both are known problems but fixes may be a long time coming as no-one seems to be adding anything useful to the bug reports.

This last weekend I tried Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu (Unity) in order to find an alternative environment in which to actually spend some time doing what I really want to do without applications freezing or failing to start. I finally settled on Xubuntu as my alternative desktop environment. Not only does everything work but it all works very quickly.

At this stage I'm thinking would Xubuntu run on my net-book? Lubuntu runs fine, may be Xubuntu would too? I might leave it a while as I think I installed one of the Ubuntu family five times this last weekend before settling on Xubuntu. Installing and configuring can be such a lengthy process, It's not something that I want to do very often especially several times in one day. But at least this weekend I ended up with something that I'm happy with.

Does the new Xubuntu 11.04 use the Xfce-4.8 version?

No crashes, no bugs a great looking interface and very quick too. I still have all my favourite applications and I can stay ahead of the game by running a test release. I might get to keep my sanity too!

Sometimes less is more.