Well yes Ubuntu is very much mainstream. I experience the whole problem more as a consequence of the documentation fragmentation. It seems it's expected of the

Well yes Ubuntu is very much mainstream. I experience the whole problem more as a consequence of the documentation fragmentation. It seems it's expected of the user to be willing to RTFM to various degrees depending on distro. That seems to be most practical way to ensure the continued confifurability of each component, so I guess the question comes down to How much modularity do you really want to be maintaining? What worked for me is to pick a set of tools after trying different combinations and learn those well. Really happy with arch+xfce as clean and fast Dev machine. Now if only X would behave...