// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
After Nearly a Decade of Distro Hopping, I Realized It Was Never About the Distro
For years I thought I had strong opinions on Linux distros. Ubuntu was too heavy or it felt. Arch was too fiddly. Kali was surprisingly practical (don't judge me).
Looking back at nearly a decade of distro hopping, I realize I had the whole thing wrong.
It was never really about the distro. It was about what desktop environment sat on top of it.
The first Linux distribution I ever installed was Linux Mint Cinnamon, around 2017. Linux Mint is what made me think Linux was actually livable. The desktop made sense. Things were where I expected them to be. It was Ubuntu underneath, sure, but that's almost beside the point; what mattered was that the experience felt considered.
I didn't move to Ubuntu until 2019. I ran it for about six months. Then I left.
The reason I told myself at the time was that Ubuntu felt slow on my hardware. I had an i3 first-gen Intel machine. Ubuntu felt sluggish in ways that bothered me. I blamed Ubuntu.
Here's what I discovered later: the culprit wasn't Ubuntu. It was GNOME.
GNOME is a beautiful desktop. I'll give it that. But on modest hardware, it feels less responsive, and even at times, it completely freezes. It shows up in the half-second delays, the slightly-too-late window redraws, and the sense that the machine is working harder than it should be.
The thing that actually kept me on Linux, the desktop environment I kept coming back to, is XFCE.
XFCE doesn't win "most beautiful desktop" polls. But I ran it on that i3 first-gen machine, and it ran smoothly out of the box. I ran it on a Core 2 Duo at some point.