I’ve decided to make the switch (again)
With any luck, 24 hours from now I will be running Xubuntu. In the meantime, I’m backing stuff up like crazy… For those of you who weren’t reading this back in the day, my first switch (from Windows XP to Gentoo Linux) happened over the course of these few entries).
I really liked Gentoo’s system of package installation/management (called Portage). I liked the feeling of having the most up-to-date software on my machine, and the knowledge that it was specially compiled for my system. I hated how every once in a while, an upgrade would break something really important (sound, flash, screensavers, SQL, etc). I hated the fact that I had to know every system inside and out just to get it to work. I never fully got printing, samba, videos in Firefox, or several other things to work simply because I didn’t have the time/effort I needed to learn about how to configure them properly.
With the exception of the second sentence above (the one about being on the bleeding edge of software with custom compiles), I believe that Xubuntu will be able to better satisfy my computing wants. Here’s hoping!
Also, thanks to macdaddyfrosh for telling me about Xubuntu; I doubt I would have found it otherwise.