> Any particular technical reason? Fully de-GNOME'ing desktop Ubuntu is Sisyphean. It's easier to build up Ubuntu Server from a plain terminal. > Any especial

> Any particular technical reason? Fully de-GNOME'ing desktop Ubuntu is Sisyphean. It's easier to build up Ubuntu Server from a plain terminal. > Any especially thorny bits? Nvidia drivers. Just check that all apt packages with the word "nvidia" in them have the same version number. Otherwise Xorg and/or torch will go boom. > Gnome or KDE I'm using neither! I have no login manager. I type my username and password into a login shell, run "startx" and that starts i3. And yes, it is somewhat alien. GTK and Qt based applications will have no theme, so they all default to that black-on-gray circa Windows 95 look. > Do you see improved performance or fewer background processes? Yes and yes. With i3wm loaded, my desktop idles at about 100MB of RAM used. My desktop compares favorably to similarly-specced entries on openbenchmarking, especially in IPC-related tests.