Back to Ubuntu: Xubuntu

That short trip to Linux Mint Debian wasn't all to successful, as Debian unstable doesn't feature Gnome2 either and thus a dist-upgrade wreaked that install. Which of course also rules out Debian as alternative to Ubuntu. So what next? Back to Ubuntu, but this time a fresh install of Xubuntu, to work around any trouble that might have been caused by years old config files floating around on my old install. So impressions so far:

• the installation looks rather unpolished and takes a bit longer then Mint
• installation doesn't allow you to not install a boot manager, it will overwrite whatever you have
• the install offers btrfs for root even so btrfs doesn't play nice with grub (error: sparse file not allowed)
• once installed, Xubuntu looks good, extremely similar to Gnome2
• most problems I had previously, like the broken volume applet are gone
• amdcccle, the ATI control center, does not work in Xubuntu, it segfaults for some reason when trying to apply the config, the driver itself however works, so it helps having a finished config around
  
• default greybird theme looks good, but misses the scroll-up/down buttons on the scrollbar and theme editing is currently not possible with XFCE
  
• there doesn't seem to be a way to move the bluetooth applet that's actually the notification area and there is a pixel or two to grab it at the side
• trouble with graphics tablet in Gimp are a known bug, can apparently be fixed with packages from ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa, however that is risky, with xorg-edgers quiting Gimp kills my xserver
  
• Gtk3 looks kind of crap, as it's not theme compatible with Gtk2 and I haven't yet found a Clearlooks equivalent
• eog is broken, displays everything with a completely wrong gamma, i.e. makes everything pretty much a white page
• Rhythmbox didn't detect MP3 player, needed to "apt-get install gnome" to fix that, not sure which component exactly did the trick
• I can mute, but not unmute via keyboard, have to click unmute from the menu
  

Overall, so far so good, when nothing unexpected pops up, I'll probably stick with Xubuntu for now.