I've been using Ubuntu for years now, and have tried really hard to get along with Unity but I now realise that Ubuntu is fundamentally no longer the distro for me. I can see and appreciate the clever stuff being done, but it just does not suit the way I have been working for many years, and so, sadly, I've decided to move on from Ubuntu.

I looked at Lubuntu, but the first two apps I wanted to install from Synaptic were also going to install Zeitgeist, and I guess that that would happen a lot with software from the Ubuntu repos? (I don't like the way that Zeitgeist is so tied into everything. I think I can see why it's so tightly integrated, but I do not use it and would like to get rid of it and free up the unnecessary processor cycles - which on a couple of occasions started eating up huge amounts of my CPU, and is what alerted me to Zeitgeist in the first place.) So, much as it pains me, I'm wondering if I should move away from Ubuntu based distros altogether?

I like the look of LXDE (haven't tried XFCE) and would appreciate your suggestions for distros. I'm not too technically proficient (the terminal still scares me) but I can follow instructions.

There are a few important things I'd like installed: Compiz and its Cube, a dock or similar launcher such as Cairo, a decent file manager, and a taskbar.