Linux Mint with Xfce as a good lightweight alternative to Ubuntu

Linux Mint is a great variation of Ubuntu. I have mainly used the xfce flavor because I wanted something lightweight to run on my old laptops. I had tried other distributions like Puppy Linux and Lubuntu but they didn't seem polished enough. I admit I have not tried Lubuntu in awhile so it may have improved.

With all that comes pre-configured with Linux Mint, I still find I am always looking for that special custom theme or other software to improve my experience. Here's a list:

System:
  • Hardinfo for System Information (kind of like Windows Device Manager)
Menu/Theme/Appearance:
  • Out-of-the-box Kokodi theme with the Xfce-dusk Appearance setting makes a very pleasing, well contrasting dark look (see screenshot below). There are also good custom xfce themes like DarkCold (highly readable dark theme)
    • Update 9/19/16: My new favorite dark settings use the LiNsta-Black-Plastic xfwm4 theme with the Adwaita-Dark gtk-2.0 appearance.  It actually provides a contrasting blue vertical scrollbar.  Other dark appearances make it very hard to see the scrollbar without customizing the gtkrc file.
    • Update 12/14/17: Updated the above slightly. I've found that Adwaita's vertical scrollbar can be hard to grab with the mouse. I'm now using a modified Clearlooks gtk-2.0 appearance - I changed the light blue bg color to selected_bg_color:#0d387c. I now have a wide, high contrast scrollbar that's easy to see and use with the mouse cursor. You can edit this in /usr/share/themes/Clearlooks/gtk-2.0/gtkrc, or make a local user copy in ~/.local/share/themes//gtk-2.0/gtkrc.
  • Window Manager customization for xfwm4 like X-Aero
  • Cairo-Dock for a Mac OS X-like dock (I configure it as a vertical menu to make better use of screen space - horizontal menus/taskbars are not space efficient on a 1920x1080 resolution).
Terminal/Client:
  • Remmina as a RDP client.
  • PuTTY - it is good for managing a list of frequently used SSH connections (and custom settings for each).
  • Terminator for an improved Terminal (I got used to copying text to the clipboard in PuTTY by simply selecting text).
Applications:
  • Oracle Virtualbox (currently using the 5.0 version in Software Manager).
  • k9copy for backing up DVDs (AcidRip and HandBrake are fine too, more so for transcoding to other codecs and formats).
  • Text editor to replace the default GEdit. Github's Atom is really, really good. I had tried the open source Sublime Text called Limetext but the make process is so involved, you feel really underwhelmed when you finally load it up and it is just half-baked.
  • Diffuse merge tool for software development.
  • Google Chrome because Chromium kept crashing on many sites.  Note: the chrome pkg  appears to introduce some dependency problems for apt-get for other software installations.
  • Bleachbit for system clean up (similar to CCleaner on Windows).
  • Shrew Soft VPN client, easiest way is to install ike-qtgui via the Software Manager rather than going through some of the lengthy install guides online.
  • WINE and/or PlayOnLinux.

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