Xubuntu: a distro that lost all relevance?

Xubuntu is "sold" on the grounds that it is designed for users with computers that have limited system resources, or for users looking for a highly efficient desktop environment. Well, this is not the case anymore.

Today, with the presence of Lubuntu and with a desktop environment like XFCE that has been growing a lot in recent times, Xubuntu has become a little used version and practically irrelevant for most Ubuntu users.

Performance

Xubuntu is still a very polished distro and XFCE has added a lot of features lately that it was missing and that users used to GNOME or KDE missed. However, all of that came at a price: speed and memory load.

To make a comparison between Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Lubuntu, the folks at OMG! Ubuntu used a computer with 1GB RAM, 2Ghz processor and 128MB of video.

The different memory consumptions were the following, having 3 pages open in Firefox, one of which played a YouTube video in HTML5:

• Ubuntu: 222MB
• Ubuntu: 215.8 MB
• Lubuntu: 137MB

As you can see, Xubuntu can no longer be classified as a "light" version of Ubuntu. Today, the lighter version is Lubuntu.

Xubuntu may still be interesting for those who prefer to use the XFCE desktop environment, which is still visually "simplistic" but very comprehensive. However, for most Ubuntu users, it became a completely irrelevant version.