Much is being written these days about Unity – but more specifically, Canonical’s decision to shift from GNOME to Unity as the default desktop environment.

When I make use of a recent-generation laptop/desktop, I use Unity. Soon after reviewing Jorge Castro’s video on multitasking in Unity, I became (and remain) a fan of Unity. About the only serious omission of the Unity environment is the absence of the panel applets that I’ve grown attached to from time spent in the GNOME environment. (I believe improvements are already afoot in this area, but I have not explored the same …)

Perhaps the only negative feedback I’d offer about Unity is that I needed Jorge’s video to get me up to speed – and I find that somewhat ironic (from a usability perspective) for a leading-edge UI …

The fact that Unity has won me over is interesting in another regard. My first exposure to Unity was on an Asus 1000 netbook via Ubuntu’s netbook remix. In hindsight though, anything negative I’d share from this time had more to do with the Asus netbook and its built-in mouse than Unity, per se.

Although I am a proponent of Unity on recent-generation laptops/desktops, I’ve found it unusable on older hardware – and this applies to the 2D as well as the 3D version. In fact, I came to using the no-effect version of the GNOME environment on the old Dell equipment I still make use of.

Though this was a passable experience most of the time, there were far too many instances of excessive paging which rendered the system unusable.

It is fortunate that my end-user experience on legacy hardware was so unacceptable.

Why?

As a direct consequence, I recently discovered Lubuntu – at precisely the time Lubuntu was receiving official recognition from Canonical as a bona fide Ubuntu flavor.

I’ve thus been using Lubuntu 11.10 since its release last Thursday (October 13, 2011). Even though the honeymoon remains in effect, the shift to Lubuntu is proving to be increasingly worthwhile – I have a responsive interface to my legacy hardware, with the option to selectively leverage Ubuntu.

One final thought … Lubuntu provides Sylpheed as its built-in mail user agent (MUA). I’ve found Sylpheed to be extremely viable on my legacy hardware. In fact, I’ve even found the latest version of Thunderbird performs reasonably well on this same platform under Lubuntu. Despite these options, I’ve remained a user of Google’s browser-based version of GMail. Why? I seem to have lost the value proposition for fat MUAs for the moment ….

Feel free to comment on this post and add your own $0.02.