Distro-hopping: Intro

January 2013
Distro-hopping has started. Bored with Mints, I am. And current Mate (1.4) is somewhat buggy.
I searched around and got more and more convinced that Xfce might cut my beef better.
It's one of these 'big four' desktops. I am quoting: 'Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly'.
It is lean and mean alright, but also quite 'full' desktop – more so than Lxde, but a lot less bloated than KDE and Gnome. It is keeping nice traditional look – things are in right places for desktop, there is no tablet-oriented bastardization. Also seems that devs are busy creating new versions.... which means – the thing is alive and kicking.
Xfce has multiple panels, compositing manager (tunable transparency for panels and windows) and classic main menu. And yes, it takes very little of your computers' resources. It depends of course, but something like 200 Mb of memory is used in my machine when no apps are running. Compare that to KDE-s 600 Mb, or Gnomes' 400 Mb.
I killed Mate and installed Xfce as my permanent system.
At the same time-period – I tested or tried out various other distros.
- Because then I was already really boss in making bootables and installing (30min, whole thing);

- Because, when I made room for Linux, I unallocated 50 Gigs. And my 'permanent Linux' takes approximately half of it. So I had 25Gb to play around;

- And because I was simply curious.

Not one of the distros tried remained as a second install – but some of them got earmarked for repeated testing in coming spring-summer – when new releases are scheduled to appear.
Next 2 posts will be about those tests.