I haven't quite jumped ship just yet

Here I am back to post on this blog which I thought that I would abandon when Unity was introduced. Much as I tried, I just could not get used to the interface, even downright hating it. It feels like a real step backwards for Ubuntu. Perhaps with time it will really shine and become great on tablets and portable devices. As a desktop user interface, it leaves much to be desired. I personally desired more, so I looked around for a while and then made the jump to Linux Mint 12. While I enjoyed using Mint, I still missed ubuntu and the community. I thought I'd give the next version a test trial when it was released, but still heard negative reviews about it. I then decided to try Xubuntu pangolin alpha. I had previously tried Xubuntu back in 2009 and liked its simple approach to things. I didn't stay with it only because I still enjoyed using Ubuntu as my everyday desktop OS at the time. I now find that I prefer Xubuntu because it reminds me of a time when Ubuntu OS was a much better desktop that I could easily configure to my liking. The Xubuntu pangolin test image is running incredibly smooth for an Alpha. Much better than any alpha release I've tried in the past. I've only encountered a couple of crashes, but that could be due to things that I'm doing with my machine.
I'm currently in the process of getting XBMC up and running on my machine as well. As I've never used it before, I've only got a basic setup at the moment, but there are so many tweaks and addons that I have to look at to take it to the next level. I will then try hooking it up to my new 42" HD LED TV and see how my family reacts.