All the Ubuntu's have terminal GUI problems. They just keep tinkering and changing things. Gnome did this to itself, too, and thus, we're left with all these weird GUIs that aspire to be Windows 8, or Mac OS, when Gnome 2 was fucking perfect and shoulda been left alone.
> All the Ubuntu's have terminal GUI problems. They just keep tinkering and changing things.
Xubuntu doesn't. 4.12 in 15.04/15.10 was much the same as 4.10 in 14.04 (other than bug fixes and some small tweaks to fix stuff they where near identical).
The XFCE folks reached rough parity with Gnome 2 in terms of desktop usability then just focussed on small increment improvements and bug fixes and that has been a major win imo as I can use a desktop that supports modern linux distro's, is fast on everything and rarely surprises me.
I was a happy Gnome 2 user for years, and am now a happy Mate user. I don't think the weird GUIs aspire to be Windows 8 or Mac OS. They just aspire to be weird.
Since the Ubuntu/Unity/Gnome3 disaster happened I switched to XUbuntu and I have been extremely happy with it. Xfce with XUbuntu is very much like the olden days of Ubuntu/Gnome2.
The only real issue with XUbuntu is the lack of window resize control. The window borders are a single pixel wide and it can be extremely frustrating to resize a window. The only way to reasonably get it done is by using the either one of the top window corners but if you use the left window corner you have to be careful not to accidentally close the window.
> Xfce with XUbuntu is very much like the olden days of Ubuntu/Gnome2
I had RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 6.5 forced on me in a workplace, and it has Gnome2. Having that side-by-side with recent xubuntu on my laptop, Xfce is way ahead, much better than Gnome2.
I use this now, but I also try to use it on some seriously old Dell laptops at my non-profit. Sadly, that means I must first install Ubuntu, vanilla. This means I then must login to Unity and install Gnome-Flashback.
Normally, this takes about 10 seconds on a modern machine. On these 10 year old Dells? Unity chugs... A task that should take me 5 minutes takes an hour because Unity lags so far behind the mouse and slows every single process on the machine to an absolute crawl.
I cussed out Canonical for this a few years ago when they asked me some survey questions. They wanted to know why Ubuntu was not more popular on the server. My answer was that Unity was such a crock of shit that no one wanted to go near damn thing, even if they were just going to make the machine into a headless server. It's that freakin' bad.
If the HW is the same, you could create a custom NixOS based desktop image based on Fluxbox (or awesome) with just the programs you need (1 browser, skype, mail program, etc.).
Then you can manage updates automatically, probably just security updates.
