I’ve installed the latest LTS release of Xubuntu Trusty Tahr (14.04) on an aging laptop. There are a few bugs noted on the release page and I suppose they’ll eventually get those worked out.
At any rate, I still refuse to support GNOME 3 or LXDE, give very little support to KDE 4, but I can endorse XFCE completely. And while I still don’t trust Canonical very much, I can tell you that the Xubuntu branch is just independent enough to be fairly safe. I don’t intend to run it that much because I don’t think there is any way it actually improves on vanilla Debian itself, but it’s a whole lot easier for folks who don’t have a lot of computer savvy. So if you have to ditch Windows, I recommend Xubuntu as a replacement.
I may have to ditch Windows on my personal machine, so this is very helpful.
Yeah, it really depends on how you expect to use it. Linux is a whole lot better for security and stability, and far safer on the Net. However, it has a long ways to go on other things. It won’t hurt to read more detailed reviews of what it can and cannot do.
Will do. It’s really only for my home PC, so I don’t really want to buy another Windows licence for something I use occasionally. The office PCs, of course, are a different matter…
I’m with you on this all the way. My cheapo netbook which came with some MS ME/WE/??EE version was utter crap. Once I slapped Xubuntu on it, the thing came alive. I plan on doing the same to this laptop which we bought so my wife could log into a MS only network.