Xubuntu 8.04 LTS — Day 1
Seeking to isolate what was causing the mysterious screen freezes on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, I first tried the Fluxbox window manager, but after some X crashes coming out of the screen-saver, I decided to add the entire Xubuntu environment to my Ubuntu installation.
I pulled in 80-some packages. I booted into Xubuntu and haven't had a crash all day. I've let the screen-saver run, I've even gone into suspend manually and then resumed.
For a day anyway, Xubuntu has not crashed. I still can't close the laptop lid (with the laptop set to blank the screen) and reopen with X awaking properly, but I'm not expecting that.
I'll run Xubuntu for the rest of the week to see if I can definitively say that something in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS' GNOME desktop is causing my random crashes.
Not that I don't like Xfce, because I do, but I wonder if upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10, with newer GNOME packages, could also solve my crashing problem (or would perform the same as 8.04). Having 8.10 be more stable than 8.04 LTS would be a curious outcome, indeed.
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Steve
If your Gateway Solo 1450 has 1Gb of RAM was there a particular reason you went for the more lightweight versions such as Fluxbox and Xubuntu? Why did you decide not to try Kubuntu and change to KDM?
Alan
I could've easily brought in the Kubuntu desktop, and KDE does run fairly well on this hardware, but strictly based on personal preference, I prefer GNOME over KDE, and I have used Xfce quite a bit in other distros, so I suppose that made me pick it for this.
I started with Fluxbox just because it's another window manager I'm familiar with, and one which is automatically configured fairly well in most distros. I could just as easily tried Fvwm or JWM.
Basing everything on common assumptions, Ubuntu with GNOME is supposed to be way more bug-free than Kubuntu or Xubuntu, given that the Ubuntu developers are very focused on their main build, but seeing this bug on my system in GNOME and, so far, not so much in Xfce has me really thinking.
I'm not yet ready to say Xubuntu runs better than Ubuntu when it comes to 8.04, but I'm getting closer to that. I'm also open to upgrading to 8.10 and seeing if newer packages somehow take care of the issue. I'd say chances are about 50-50.
More on GNOME vs. KDE. I suppose if I was a developer and really liked QT and C++, I'd have a reason to choose KDE over GNOME, but as it stands, I'm comfortable in the GNOME environment, and that's why I stick with it.
I have run a few KDE apps, either in GNOME or on a KDE desktop, that I like, including K3b, Krita and the not-mainstream KDenlive video editor. But I'm not crazy about KDE's configuration apps. Of course in Kubuntu a lot of GNOME-ish stuff sticks around, so that softens the blow.
But the way it's supposed to work is that Ubuntu with GNOME is the most polished of all 'buntu distros.
I do tend to think that any distro runs better with its "main" window manager, be it KDE (Slackware), GNOME (Debian) or Xfce (Wolvix/ZenWalk/Vector).
Of course I'm ready at this point to be proven wrong.