A couple of weeks ago I bought an Acer Aspire One! It never even made it to the “Welcome to Windows” screen; it was boot up with an Ubuntu USB key. I tried desperately to get used to gnome 3, and unity, and I just couldn’t do it. Besides painfully slow, I’m just not a fan of fullscreen apps, dynamic desktop space allocation, lack of customizability, etc.

After a couple days of that I decided to try out Xubuntu. I wanted to get a Linux experience I was used to, but have a window manager that I actually like using. Xfce has turned out to be amazing! it’s extremely light weight, and it has the full customizability that I loved from Gnome-2.

I upgraded the ram from 1G to 2G, and upgraded the internal 250GB hard drive to a 60GB SSD. After doing some tuning in the system to disable atime, use a different queue scheduler for the disk, and offload the chrome cache directory into a tmpfs, this thing flies. It’s still a little difficult getting used to the small size of it.. but i love it.