Bye Bye Ubuntu - The Opening Of A Void

I am a big fan of Ubuntu Linux. But I guess its time to say goodbye to Canonical's Wonder, perhaps permanently. My first ever Linux distribution was ubuntu Linux 7.04. It taught me nearly everything I know about Linux. It, and the huge community it has have collectively ensured that I became a Linux user and a good one too.

But ubuntu is just not suited for me anymore. Its current version, 8.04, is too heavy for my system to handle. It has huge startup times and is laggy. Several features fail to work. My 2.66GHz Pentium 4 processor, with 256mb DDR 400MHz RAM and onboard Intel GMA900 Graphics just appeared too little to be able run ubuntu now. Its Gnome 2.22 was a HUGE bloat. Compared to my previous highly satisfactory experience with Gnome 2.18, this gnome had hardly any more features but it still hung and lagged like nothing else. KDE was fast and responsive but it was a bit too hot for the system to handle; it took its own time to start because the one provided with kubuntu-desktop package was jam packed with things I never needed. I switched to IceWM, and now I am a big fan of this nifty little window manager. But minimalism can only last so long. So I decided to switch to another operating system.

I concluded that Knoppix, Debian GNU/Linux, Vector Linux and Zenwalk were my choices. My friend Beojan Stanislaus convinced me to stick with a Debian based distro because Debian packaging system is still unrivaled and it has a huge repository. Knoppix was more of a live distro than an installable one, so Debian was the choice. He asked me to take Sid "Unstable", but out of fear for stability of my computer, I stuck with Lenny, the "Testing Release".

You might expect the story to be happy from now, but sadly, it isn't. I am considering leaving lenny too, and that calls for another post. Keep watching my blog as I write my entire set of experiences with Lenny.