Xubuntu

I've been running Ubuntu 10.04 for a couple of years, but it goes end-of-life soon. I knew that upgrading would more-or-less mean learning a new window manager: Unity or something else. I decided to try going with XFCE in Xubuntu 12.04 (which will have support until April 2017).

I have so far been pretty happy with it. I backed up everything I could think of to a second hard drive, and then did a fresh install off of a USB drive. It didn't take long, and then I spent a couple of hours restoring files and setting up software and stuff, such as...

• installing google chrome and importing bookmarks (I'd exported them prior to the upgrade)
• restoring ~/.purple so that pidgin would work
• installing postfix and configuring it to relay off of gmail, so that logwatch and my cron jobs would land in my gmail inbox (I'd already done this, so I just had to restore a couple of files)
• installing VirtualBox and restoring ~/.virtualbox (and my guest machines booted without much complaint)
• pointing gmusicbrowser at my MP3 collection and skinning it to look like rhythmbox (there are some minor differences I'm still getting used to, but it looks like the playlists I exported from rhythmbox import right into gmusicbrowser, so that's a pleasant surprise)
• setting up an encrypted subdirectory in $HOME

I find that I don't much care for the panel at the bottom (the one that's supposed to look like OS X), so I may end up removing it. And I'm finding that the keyboard shortcut for "maximize window" is flaky for some reason. But those are about the only two wrinkles I've found. It was otherwise pretty painless, and it took less time than I expected.