Back to Dapper

I had been using Xubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on my laptop for a year and a half with a couple brief interruptions to try new distros. Last weekend I put Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on to try it out. I liked the idea of the update checker and the fact that the GNOME games are included. I like the Chess game that was added to the games for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

After I installed it, I went to the terminal and tried to check for updates using Aptitude. It kept erroring out on some of the sources, so I couldn't update. Shortly after that, the laptop just shut down. Not gracefully, it just powered off.

The next day I was able to run the updates, but once again, the laptop just shut down without warning. I had downloaded some documentation, so I decided to write it to CD and then switch back to Dapper. The program that's included in Gutsy (Brasero), was able to blank the re-writable disc, but could not write anything to it. After trying a few times, I installed Gnome-baker and wrote the files to CD.

I re-installed Dapper and decided to run with it until support runs out in April of 2009.

Dapper is a great version. It runs faster on my laptop than any other Xubuntu version and uses less memory than the others. It's a good balance between being usable and easy on system resources. When it boots up, it uses only about 58 Mb, but when Gutsy booted, it used about 80Mb. Gutsy also felt more like GNOME than XFCE. I understand what people have been complaining about when they talk about the 'GNOME-ification' of XFCE. I also realize that the update-checker is overrated. How hard is it to type 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get upgra' in a terminal window?

The Firefox 1.5 is a bummer, but it's a small price to pay for the all the benefits of Dapper. It's quick, stable, nice to use, and it doesn't spontaneously power off at random!