I have tried very many distros the last couple of years ranging from Arch, Debian Stable, Aptosid, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Chakra......yada yada. I must say that nothing works with my hardware quite like the ubuntu family of distros. I enjoy building my own machines and use Linux on all of them. I am also a home school teacher ...I need my computer to work! I like tweaking and digging deep into my machine too...but... in the end I don’t have time to waste and need a stable machine with a working printer.

I just wanted to share my joy with the Lubuntu 11.10 distro. I do not have an old computer(and both Kubuntu and Ubuntu with unity work without problems) but I wanted to see how my machine would run without all of the “fluff” added to it so I decided to install Lubuntu. I must say that I have never had an OS install so quickly. I also had my sound, video, and printer configured in less than 20 minutes. I decided to try cairo-dock because I read that it runs well without compositing. (Compositing with xcompmgr didn’t work for me for some reason) and I have no complaints at all with my system. It runs amazingly fast. Faster than ever. Sometimes in my other ubuntu versions... I would notice a bit of choppiness when a hulu video would load up....not with Lubuntu. Hulu video(and all others) is really smooth. I don’t think that I will go back to the others now that I am spoiled with the speed of my machine. I honestly didn’t think Lubuntu would stay on my machine long because I was afraid it wouldn’t be “cool” without the bling but honestly....the only time I ever even used the desktop cube in my other distros was when someone came over and I wanted to show off my computer. When someone who uses windows comes over and sees the desktop cube....well you know how it is. I have 4 desktops in Lubuntu which is the same amount that I used in ubuntu so I lost no functionality. Yes...LXDE is touted to older machines because it is not bloated but that doesn’t mean a new loaded machine won’t benefit from it. If you are looking for speed and have outgrown the coolness of the cube...then take a look at Lubuntu 11.10!

My 2 cents,

Penny