[xubuntu-users] Hi, Newbie Here

[Robin]

Hi!

I'm a noob. Relatively, anyway. Started with Ubuntu in March of this 
year. Tried Crunchbang and it's awesome, but not especially 
kid-friendly. Played with LXDE for a bit, but it's really buggy and I'm 
getting tired of the hassle. It's pretty and kid-friendly, but it 
frustrates me no end with all the little annoying bugs, so I thought I 
would check out Xfce, and since Ubuntu is where I started, Xubuntu might 
be the easiest way to do that. I'll install it as soon as Xubuntu Karmic 
comes out. But I have some pointed noob questions which I'm sure you 
have heard before.  The closest things to my questions in the archives 
are pretty old now, so maybe alot has changed.

First question: IMPLEMENTATION seems to be an issue I've read alot 
about. Over and over again in forums and blogs I have read stuff like this:

"KDE is great, but Kubuntu sucks," and "Xfce is great, but Xubuntu sucks 
(is 'bloated,' etc)."

With KDE I can kinda sorta understand it. On PCLinuxOS, KDE was 
magnificent, but reeeeeeally slow on my poor old 'puter. But Kubuntu was 
horrible! It had better hardware detection, but it was maddeningly slow 
and buggy (even buggier than LXDE has been). I haven't tried Xubuntu yet 
(waiting for Karmic), but where do all the complaints about "bloat" come 
from? It's Ubuntu after all, so it's bound to be "bloated" in that 
Ubuntu tries to be all things to all users. But no one complains that 
Ubuntu is bloated! Is it just that the people who are complaining 
expected something OTHER than Ubuntu with Xfce? Or is the 
*implementation* of Xfce in Xubuntu comparable to KDE's implementation 
in Kubuntu?

Second question: Has there been any effort to "lighten up" Xubuntu to 
appease its critics (even though their criticisms may be unfair)? Ubuntu 
ran okay on my older 'puter, but I'm told by some people that Xubuntu is 
alot faster. And I'm told by others that it's just as slow as Ubuntu! 
That would really be okay with me I guess (because it isn't Gnome and 
hopefully won't be as aggravating as LXDE has been). But now I don't 
know what to expect, and I'd like my expectations to be more realistic 
than they were with my LXDE experience. Grrr.

Third: I've just learned yesterday that Xubuntu is not a Canonical 
product, but a "community distro." I was shocked! Lubuntu is supposed to 
be a Canonical project just like Kubuntu and Ubuntu are. Why not 
Xubuntu? What's the difference?

I hope I haven't ruffled any feathers or brought up anything unpleasant 
with that last question (or the others either I guess), but it looks to 
a noob, looking in from the outside, as though Xubuntu is being "dissed" 
or something. I'd just like to know why.

I can't wait to try Xubuntu! I'll have to wait for the CD though because 
I have bandwidth issues here. But I'm anxious to learn, and to hopefully 
rid my kid-friendly 'buntu of these stupid LXDE bugs!

Thanks very much in advance!

Robin
(dixiedancer on UF)