Its GNOME desktop isn't as fast as Debian's. But even though I do have Xfce (and not the full Xubuntu) installed on this Ubuntu laptop, I'm still using the brownish-themed GNOME that ships with the distro.

"I'm getting used to all the GNOME-ish touches in the Nautilus file manager and in Ubuntu/GNOME in general that makes a full-fledged desktop environment such a nice place to work.

"On rare occasion -- maybe once every couple of weeks -- I have a show-stopping crash in which the screen freezes and ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete don't work at all. To get going again, I have to hard-reset the laptop. Both times I was accessing a rather-heavy Flash-based Web application, so I blame Flash 9 for the trouble.