My New Lubuntu Desktop

Big news from the home office in beautiful Skokie, IL: I have not been enjoying my Unity desktop environment experience very much. I am not alone is this.  In the past I have fixed other Ubuntu oddities such as the Aubergine barf color scheme and the placing and reordering of the window buttons on the top left, ala OS X. My solution to this whole Unity business is to switch to Lubuntu, which uses  LXDE. I call this the natty quick fix (NQF):

sudo apt get install lubuntu-desktop

Log out, then log in again into Lubuntu. Add other Lubuntu/LXDE packages as desired.

I put the bar up on the top, ala Gnome 2, added the Cairo Dock and found that Gnome-Do still works. I'm a happy, happy camper once again.

I can't complain too much, because you do not have to use Unity or Unity 2D. There are so many desktop environment/window manager options available from the standard repositories. I could even use Gnome 2 while it lasts, without adding a single package. (It's supposed to go away in the next release, but it's still available for now.)  That's a nice thing about Ubuntu: You can customize the heck out of it. There are a lot of other desktop options out there, options that will not kill my current installation. I do not want to reinstall at this time. There's KDE, XFCE4, LXDE, Window Maker, etc., all available for installation from the repository. I chose LXDE. Earlier, I tried it in a virtual machine and had a good experience. Now it's working well for me directly on hardware.

LXDE is supposed to be a lightweight desktop environment. but with all the crap I'm running on it, Conky shows a crapload of memory being used. (It's showing 1.48 GB being used right now, and all I'm doing is editing this blog post.) I'll look into that later. Right now life is too good.