In search of the perfect desktop

I am usually in favor of change. It takes a lot for me to say "This is too much of a new thing". However, recently there was one such moment. I got a new laptop at work recently and I had to decide which Linux distro to go with. I usually go with either Fedora or Ubuntu on my desktops. However, recent versions of both Fedora and Ubuntu have had major modifications to the desktop environment. While Fedora ships with Gnome 3, Ubuntu has put Unity interface on top of Gnome 3. Although both are major changes from Gnome 2 based distros, I was confident that I would be able to start liking them easily and quickly. How wrong was I!

My first choice of distro was Ubuntu 11.10. Unity desktop was okay, but there were many minor irritants that I found tough to adjust to, even after a week of using it. Pidgin notifications wouldn't work the way I want, some window switches required more keystrokes than before and so on. I started looking for options to tweak Unity to suit my taste. Slowly I realized that this may not be easy. Hence I decided to try Gnome 3, so installed Gnome 3 shell on top of Ubuntu 11.10. I was able to adjust to Gnome 3 much better than to Unity, but there were still some irritants that I just could not fix. So I decided to try out other options. The first stop was KDE. I was an old friend of KDE, so it did not take any ramp-up time, even though I had never used KDE 4.x before. In the mean time I got Linux Mint 12 installed on another disk partition. Mint has done a great deal of work with Gnome 3 to make it behave like Gnome 2. It fixed pretty much all my grouses. I could have just lived with that. However, by now I was determined to try as many options as possible before finalizing my desktop. Sometimes I get into this sort of mode.

The only other reasonable option seemed to be XFCE. XFCE on top of Ubuntu 11.10 worked like a charm. It seemed to do everything I wanted and nothing more. It is simplistic by today's standards, but not short in functionality. After using each desktop environment for a couple of days, I was convinced that I should stick with XFCE. At least till Gnome folks make Gnome 3 useful again.

So I cleanly re-installed my laptop with Xubuntu 11.10. I like some of the tweaks Xubuntu folks have done to XFCE. I have stuck to Xubuntu as my primary desktop for the last few weeks and I think I will stick to XFCE for an year, if not more. End of search. For now.