Screenshot of my MX-Linux 21 XFCE installation
Based on the lavish praise heaped upon Ubuntu 22.04, I gave it a shot, and found that it's actually quite disappointing, starting with the 3.4GB displacement of the ISO. It doesn't even do a very good job of opening files in response to clicking on their icons, which is one of the most basic functions. I had to install quite a few apps to compensate for the poor functionality of of the ones included by default, and just installing APT-offline (not the GUI) required a download of something on the order of 10 MB, as I recall, whereas with MX-Linux XFCE, I just had to install a couple of small packages. The highly-touted workspace-overview struck me as a gimmick designed just to be different, rather than functional, because it's essentially as easy to use multiple workspaces in XFCE - there's a workspace-switcher widget which has an icon in the panel which provides a thumbnail of each workspace. It doesn't even have a desktop-notes app or widget, although Feather Notes is excellent and requires only a 750 kb download to install it. I previously used Ubuntu Mate, and I still use Kubuntu on my desktop-PC, and both of them are great, although I still prefer MX-Linux XFCE. The KDE version is also excellent, although each package-index update requires a download of approximately 120 MB, and the file manager, without add-ons, is a toy compared to Thunar.
So, I did a search for articles by others with a similar perspective on Gnome, the desktop used (with modifications) by Ubuntu, and eventually found one entitled GNOME Linux — A Complete Disaster?, based on versions up to 41, by someone who develops other Linux distributions. It supports the complaints of a former Ubuntu-developer, who claims that Canonical no longer cares about Ubuntu desktop.
My current favorite is MX-Linux 21 XFCE, partly because the file manager (Thunar) is powerful and easy to use, and MX-Linux includes MX Tools, including the apparently-unique Snapshot tool which allows installations to be turned into ISOs. This allowed me to turn my installation into a live installation, which I put on a cool-running 4GB USB2 drive and run on my air-gap PC (a $200 Gigabyte Brix, which consumes very little energy and has plenty of power for my purposes), and when I shut it down, the installation doesn't retain any session-data. Since I use the original installation for nothing but tweaking the installation and making new ISOs, I didn't have to worry about power consumption and put it on a Sandisk Ultra Luxe USB3 drive which has a fast write-speed but runs hot, indicating high power consumption. I can also connect it to the internet to make changes, with confidence that no hacker can access any data on it. With other Debian-types of Linux, I would have to use the original installation as my working-installation, and I would use APT-offline to make changes to it (including upgrading the OS itself) to avoid connecting it to the internet.
