Ubuntu is still snot.

Some business was throwing out a couple of old laptops and my flatmate ended up with one: which means I get to try to make it work. After waiting about 8 hours for it to book the ubuntu live cd a couple of times I thought it wasn't going to be much use: until I opened the SODIMM cover and saw the 512MB module had fallen out. At least 768MB makes it almost usable ...

But yeah so I ended up installing xubuntu 12.04 (I didn't just go with fedora because that's a pain if you're using XFCE as well, not to mention all that systemd and other crap). I can't say I have much good to say about it on first impressions:

• The default theme is whack. It's hard to tell if a window is focused or not, and there's no scroll up/down buttons which makes it a pain to use. Nice to finally see someone realise black on white writing sucks though, and at least the terminals are grey. I kinda wish XFCE had window title colours other than "windows 95 blue" though (all but one).
• Way too much shit is attached to the touchpad 'scroll area'. WTF would you ever want to change desktops this way, or shade your windows?
• The "ubuntu software centre" is a complete joke. Ugly, slow, hard to use. My first impression was "must be some python crap"; confirmed. I only ran it accidentally as I was looking for the real thing, i.e. synaptic. Ok, sure if it was a few weeks work on a prototype, but if this is supposed to be a production-ready bit of code it is a total embarrassment.
• Notwork-Manager still ... doesn't work properly. I gave up on the on-board wireless which refuses to connect for whatever reason, but I have a very old PCMCIA card as well. I got that working easily by running a few commands manually but Notwork-Manager just kept retrying and failing, retrying and failing ...

All it really needs to do is play videos and visit youtube, so i'm not asking for much. If I can get it that far along I will leave it.