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How do Xubuntu and Linux Mint XFCE Edition compare in terms of lightness and performance?
I'm considering moving back to the Linux world after having jumped ship to Windows around Ubuntu 20.04, mostly due to increasing bloat, snap and other things I don't recall.
I've used Xubuntu in the past, the Thunderbird theme was good but I was disappointed by how little customization was allowed there, even the selection of wallpapers seems bland, especially when I compare it to Mint now. Even when it comes to UX experience, it seems Mint puts a lot of effort in enhancing the user experience?
So how do these two compare in terms of performance? As long as the difference isn't substantial, I'm leaning towards Linux Mint now mostly because of two reasons:
- Better UX, selection of wallpapers, customizing ability, etc. as described above.
- Mint is a community project unlike Canonical which is corporate, I like this aspect too.
What is your own preference in this regard and what do you suggest?
If you really don't want Snap, pick Linux Mint as they by default disable it from being installed by apt. And if I remember correctly they also provide some things that normally would be snaps through their apt repositories, like Chromium, but I can't remember exactly.
Customizing, wallpapers, etc. is fully up to you because they both use XFCE which is pretty configurable through XFCE's settings and panels functionality.
I tried out Linux Mint with Cinnamon (not XFCE) and was pleasantly surprised by a lot of the features it had, though I love XFCE so eventually moved to NixOS with that instead.
I've used both. The difference in resource usage should be negligible.
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu LTS so you won't get some of the more recent apps and system components by default. Linux Mint is like a layer of niceties over Ubuntu -- and very good ones.
However, if you're going to use Mint, Cinnamon is the main flavor and would be a better alternative to XFCE. There is also the Mate desktop that is a little lighter. They're both made by the Mint team. Unless you're on a very constrained machine, the numbers will change a bit, but you won't notice any difference in performance. They look pretty good too.
Every time I've tried other distros over the years I always end up back on Debian. Debian does everything I want, most how I want it done, and best of all it doesn't mess me about with "releases" which inevitably end up breaking things. To a bare bones Debian system I can add the things I want and just the things I want. If I don't want Snap I just don't install it. It's pretty useful so it's there, but y'know. I didn't have to.
For a desktop environment, personally I've liked Gnome for a while now. Shell is just about the most invisible UI I've ever used and all I want is something that gets out of my way. I find old school things like XFCE, Cinnamon etc much clunkier, but each to their own. It's easy enough to install and uninstall different DEs if you want anyway. Because Debian makes it easy.
It sounds like you want Mint, and if your computer isn't a literal potato, it should be fine. You can always start pruning non-essential services which will be the main difference.