I started using Xfce out of necessity, where Ubuntu with Gnome would take 5~10 minutes to boot up on my old computer, while Xubuntu and Mint Xfce would take no more than 1 minute and 20 seconds (this being in the past 1~2 years).

Now that I finally got a new computer (the old one was working overtime, poor thing), despite being a big leap, I still see myself installing Xfce systems out of habit (but hey, at least optimization is a good habit to have =D ).

I’ve found that adding flatpak and flathub solves the old packages on Ubuntu based distributions for me, at least for the most part. It obviously doesn’t really work for cli stuff but then the only cli app I regularly use is yt-dlp and I install that via pip

i hopped from arch/wm to xub too. tbh everything i learned from setting up awesome, qtile, open box etc helped me get really into the functionality of xfwm and make it really work for me. it’s a little sluggish, but only compared to a completely bare bones wm. the distro hopping phase was a valuable learning experience, but i think this is a perfectly fine place to settle down.

i’ve been curious about the minimal edition. now that i’ve found replacements and workarounds in the ubuntu repos, i’ve been wanted to do a fresh install with that. i’ve got ~3100 packages just from trying stuff out and forgetting to uninstall it haha.