The laptop won’t let me dual boot. That’s coz the lappy isn’t actually mine, it’s the office laptop. So I was running Ubuntu in Virtualbox all this time. Ubuntu 9.10  (I know!). But then I switched to 12.04 – Precise Pangolin. Unity is pretty cool now compared to what it was back then in 11.04. However it’s a no-no for running in a VBox. Switched to gnome classic sans effects which improved the performance drastically.

I had used LXDE for a few months about an year back in my netbook. So I thought, why not give it a go again? Without removing the existing gnome packages, I typed,

sudo apt-get install lxde-core

into the terminal. It gave me the LXDE desktop, but that’s as far as it went. Just the desktop. No Leafpad, no PCMan, no LXTerminal, nothing. Hey, that isn’t LXDE! What’s LXDE without Leafpad or PCMan? So I went ahead and typed,

sudo apt-get install lxde

and, voila, here I have what I wanted. (Lesson: don’t install lxde-core, just use lxde and it gives you everything)

Okay, the interface isn’t as polished as that of gnome, that’s a given. It’s only supposed to be lighter and faster. But unfortunately it felt like the system isn’t much comfortable having LXDE around. It felt like the kernel’s carrying a bulk. Not as smooth as the classic gnome experience. I know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen, so I’d try this for two or three days and switch back to gnome. Good thing I didn’t remove the gnome packages before installing.

Oh wait, perhaps it’s a good time to try out XFCE!