Fun with (X)ubuntu, non-power user edition

I first started to work on unix-type operating systems as an undergraduate, in my sophomore year of 1991-1992, and used them almost exclusively for 4 years while a graduate student. Mind, I had nothing to do with maintenance of these systems (we had a great sysadmin for that), but was a pretty experienced user by 1998. Then I moved to Chicago to work for SPSS, Inc, spent all my time at work on Windows (NT, then 2K, now XP), and my unix skills atrophied. I made a couple of attempts around 2000-2001 to play with a couple different linux distros and freeBSD, but I really just didn't care to spend that much time installing and tooling with my OS, especially when all the great free unix-y apps were being ported to Windows (bring out the GIMP!).

Then, last summer we got a new desktop at home, and I could do whatever the heck I wanted with the old one. My brother-in-law (Ankara) turned me on to Ubuntu, and I toyed around with the Dapper Drake version in my (sadly limited) spare time. The real problem was that the Gnome and KDE desktops felt slow on the old PIII. However, SPSS was now going to ship a Linux client version, so working with my linux box was actually useful for work (the surest way to learn anything is to have a practical goal), so I made do with the Gnome interface most of the summer.

Within the last month, however, I started poking around Xubuntu and decided I really liked how the xfce desktop ran. A co-worker then promptly pointed out Fluxbuntu for older computers, but I think I'll stick with Xubuntu until Fluxbuntu is a little more mature -- not that Xubuntu doesn't have its share of growing pains, the A-#1 for me being the lack of "native" browsing on networked Windows machines. Thank goodness for ubuntuforums.org and google, which revealed this and that.