Is xubuntu really lighter?

[mystika1]

Hi,
I have been researching and reading a lot of conflicting threads. I really just wanna know....Is xubuntu really lighter than ubuntu?

Thanks,

Penny

[3Miro]

Many XFCE distribution suffer from the fact that XFCE comes as an after thought. Many of them make the mistake to just take Gnome and replace some of the components with XFCE and hence you sometimes end up not with one light XFCE, but running both XFCE and Gnome (thus having something heavier than either).

I haven't tried the latest Xubuntu, but their setup varies significantly from a version to a version. 10.04 wan't very good, 10.10 was really good, I am not sure about 11.04 and 11.10.

I am using XFCE right now, but what I did was I installed Ubuntu and then added the xfce4 package. I did not add any of the goodies things (those load Gnome applets in the xfce4-panel and they tends to slow things down). Then I had to play a little with the startup scripts to make sure that not all Gnome-services run under xfce4. The result is pretty snappy system and I am quite happy with it. Whenever I want, I can pick between the flashy-shiny Unity and clean-snappy Xfce4.

[kurt18947]

I did install Xubuntu 11.04 on a geriatric Thinkpad and it in combination with the Chromium browser make a PIII notebook with 512 MB. RAM perform adequately for web browsing and typical office work. Chromium does seem to perform better on that machine even though I prefer FireFox if machine specs are not limiting.