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Xubuntu is not a refugee camp

In growing amounts, people are migrating to Xubuntu from Ubuntu and other derivatives. While many of our new users tell they love Xubuntu, some of them would like to see a feature from their old configuration, be that a feature from their desktop environment or an application closely tied with it.

I don’t blame them for wanting different features than I do. I truly think there is users for every major and minor desktop environment. There will not be one desktop environment to rule them all, just because peoples opinions on looks and the perfect workflow differ thoroughly.

When our new users ask if they can have their feature, we have to ask them, and especially, what the user needs to ask theirself is if the feature, or the lack of, is really something that makes or breaks their experience. If they don’t think they can be at home without that feature, I wholeheartedly recommend them to keep using what they had.

If they are uncertain, I’d really like them to try to see the coin from the other side. Xfce nor Xubuntu have never  tried to be like GNOME or Ubuntu. When Unity came around, Xubuntu never tried to become a substitute for GNOME 2 -like Ubuntu either, or specifically persuade migrating users.

The Xfce team has always been executing their own vision of the perfect desktop environment. Since the vision has been in some parts similar to GNOME earlier, some might argue that Xfce should still follow GNOME’s footsteps by implementing some new features similar to GNOME’s new features. I don’t think this is logical thinking, and it sounds like it comes from somebody who thinks Xfce should satisfy people who are migrating from GNOME.

The same goes with Xubuntu too: we are still building Xubuntu on top of Xfce because we like how it is and can agree with their vision. If this will ever change, it’s self-evident that either the people running Xubuntu need to change or Xubuntu needs to stop being. That being said, I don’t think that’s going to happen in the foreseeable future.

Finally, I’d like to emphasize that all users migrating from Ubuntu and other desktop environments are warmly welcome to the Xubuntu community. There are many ways to achieve the same goal when it comes to desktop environments. We believe Xfce is the best one for us as it has been and as it is. We are not a refugee camp, we have decided to take this path. This is our home.

This article is part of the article series .

Working on the Xubuntu documentation rewrite

As you might know, the Xubuntu team has been planning a full offline documentation rewrite, calling for contributors and officially launching the rewrite. While we have had a great bunch of people sign up for contributing, only a few things had been accomplished before a few days ago. However, it was time for the me to stay awake for a whole night two nights ago, and my time was almost completely dedicated for the documentation rewrite.

In the temporary wiki Elizabeth kindly set up for the documentation rewrite, we have now made quite a progress. While we are still far away from being ready, the structure is now reviewed, and unnecessary and obsolete parts have been striked out. No need to worry about those anymore! We also merged quite a few subpages and did some writing, mostly to What is Xubuntu? but also other topics. Yesterday, I continued with the work, and the topic Adding and removing applications is now in a pretty good shape too.

Those of you who have signed up for contributing; this is your time to step up at last. There’s now plenty of examples of what kind of structure, titles, writing style and general atmosphere we want for the documentation. If you are still hesitating to actually edit any content on the documentation, it helps if you can copy the old documentation content to the pages on the wiki that aren’t striked out.

We’re hoping to do much more progress in the following week or two, because that’s about as much time as we have to get most of the rewriting done. While the Documentation String Freeze isn’t hitting us earlier than September 20th, we still need to make sure everything is correct in the documentation both grammatically and technically. We also need to convert the documentation to DocBook syntax and create a new documentation looks too. After we’ve done all that, we still need to upload the new documentation to the repositories so our users can actually get to enjoy it. That’s a lot of work!

But that’s not all: once the rewriting and reviewing part is done, we need to set up translations. However, that’s a different topic and definitely a different blog article. It’s also something we should start worrying about towards the end of September – assuming we are getting the rewriting and reviewing done by that!