Making Ubuntu Usable Again - Cleaning up the Natty Unity Mess
The Unity interface is plagued by bugs and for many people it is completely unintuitive. I gave Unity an honest chance but things I used so often were hidden and other things I never used got in the way. My first thought was to go back to Ubuntu GNOME or Classic as it is now known in the Ubuntu world. This is also plagued by one very annoying bug: it randomly switches your preferences to an ugly interface circa 1995. I found myself restarting gnome every hour or so…not exactly my definition of productive.
Time to shop for desktop environments
The most popular alternative is of course KDE and since Linus Trovalds thinks it’s the best without further explanation than it must be the way to go. Well not so much unless you like a very Windows-y interface and you like to wait 20 minutes for your desktop environment to load after you log in. So I took the risk of going against the self proclaimed god of open source, software and know-it-all-ness and tried XFCE/Xubuntu. It’s a very easy change:
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
XFCE looks good, is as configurable as GNOME and even faster and more lightweight than gnome. I have no complaints and it does everything I need it to and nothing that would annoy me. I did not like the way the panels were configured at first but it took me about 5 minutes to configure it to my preferences. The window theme was a bit too bright for me as well so I just changed the theme to Albatross and I could not be happier. Best of all there are no major bugs (or minor bugs that I noticed) and it does not get in your way.
If you want a desktop environment to stay out of your way so you can continue to get work done I suggest you try it as an alternative to Unity/Gnome/KDE.
