Linuxembourg
Active Member
I installed Debian XFCE on my friends old Dell laptop at the weekend. I realised pretty quickly why it is considered difficult to use for beginners, and to some extent why it is considered so good. Fortunately my brief experience was enough that it wasn't that difficult. I had to add non-free sources and install the firmware for the wifi, but I am familiar now with what I am being asked to do. I only really used it for an hour or two after setting up. It used <300MB RAM without anything running which is lovely.
I was surprised that everything (from a user tweaking pov) seemed the same. Especially as I was using XFCE rather than LXQT that I am used to. If I had a day or so, I could easily make it exactly the same as my Lubuntu (afaict at least).
The whole thing leaves me wondering (even more) about the purpose of all the distros and what actually constitutes a distro. At what point does something become a separate distro and not just a themed version of Debian with different applications installed?
I was surprised that everything (from a user tweaking pov) seemed the same. Especially as I was using XFCE rather than LXQT that I am used to. If I had a day or so, I could easily make it exactly the same as my Lubuntu (afaict at least).
The whole thing leaves me wondering (even more) about the purpose of all the distros and what actually constitutes a distro. At what point does something become a separate distro and not just a themed version of Debian with different applications installed?