Xubuntu and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS — Day 3

Things have gone very smoothly on my third day of using the Xubuntu flavor of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. While in Xfce (Xubuntu's desktop environment), I haven't had the screen, keyboard and mouse freeze at all.

Wondering whether all this good fortune was really due to starting with the Xfce window manager instead of GNOME, I logged out, changed my WM to GNOME and logged back in.

Everything seemed to be going well. But in the mid-afternoon, I had a couple browser windows open and was writing in Gedit when the thing froze up on me. (Had I saved my document in Gedit? Nope.)

So regular old Ubuntu 8.04 hasn't improved at all. My ability to keep this distro running is somehow due to whatever Xubuntu packages take precedence over those in Ubuntu when logged in with Xfce.

By the way, the Trackpad utility in Ubuntu doesn't show up in Xubuntu, so I modified the xorg.conf in Ubuntu/Xubuntu to turn off tapping in my Alps touchpad by adding the line setting "MaxTapTime" to 0:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
# adding next line in attempt to turn off tapping
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
EndSection

I've always been pretty happy with Xfce. I used it more often than not in Slackware and always in Wolvix. And with all the tools that Ubuntu keeps across all of its companion distros (including Kubuntu and Xubuntu), running Xfce isn't all that different than running GNOME.

The strengths of Xfce are that the Thunar file manager and Mousepad text editor are lightning fast and quite functional. I'm also OK managing the desktop with the Xfce tools. I discovered that Xorg.conf line to turn off touchpad tapping when I was setting up CentOS 5.2, and I think this is a much better way to deal with the issue than using the Q/G/Ksynaptics package. I believe that in "regular" Ubuntu each user can set up the touchpad according to their individual preferences, but since I don't have any users, potential or real, who like touchpad tapping, turning it off globally in xorg.conf is definitely the way to go.

Now that I'm sure that Ubuntu with GNOME is still screwing up on this hardware, I'll continue using Xubuntu/Xfce for the next few days to make sure everything continues working.

And while I'm reluctant to move off of the LTS to Ubuntu 8.10, that does remain an option. While the LTS' 3-year support timeframe is something I'd like to have, with the "regular" Ubuntu release, there's still 18 months of support, which means I could keep the same system for quite awhile nonetheless. The quality of support (i.e. bug fixes and security patches) for Ubuntu is not something I feel qualified to judge, but the 18-month life of non-LTS releases is something I'm very much in favor of.

Fedora's releases have a 13-month life, and OpenSUSE's are two years, I believe. I think Ubuntu is right where they should be, given that there's also the LTS release with 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the server. I initially hoped that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS would run well enough that I could ride it out for at least a year, maybe two, without running into problems, and while I've "solved" the problem that has cropped up, not being able to use GNOME isn't exactly the solution I was looking for.

In conclusion: It would be a strange thing indeed if Xubuntu ended up running better on my Gateway Solo 1450 than the flagship Ubuntu distro. While I've had luck with Xubuntu in the past (I think my favorite version was 7.04), regular Ubuntu always seemed to be more polished and stable than Xubuntu or Kubuntu. Until now.