justjed:
Thing is, I have already promised myself to ditch Ubuntu and find a distro which isn't hell-bent on pulling the rug out from under all the things I already know how to do, and make me deal with yet another batch of newfangled desktop interface crap.
I dunno if its the distro, so much as it is the desktop environment developers.
Well, they're certainly doing their share, but Canonical is a driver. And they're the source of Unity. Not that I'm praising Gnome shell (or condemning it -- since I haven't seen it).
I can certainly sympathize with your complaints: I'm a big fan of KDE 3, having used it for almost 10 years,
KDE is what got me away from Fvwm in the first place. It was nice while it lasted
and the the little I've seen of KDE4 is distinctly unimpressive.
And that's what got me back to using Fvwm.
so it's a little unfair to say that they're "hell-bent" on forcing change on you.
Oh, it isn't just the desktop interface. Here's one example: when I "upgraded" to 9.10, the upgrade removed the extra fonts I'd installed. Why do that on an upgrade? It isn't as if the presence of several .ttf files is going to blow up the new version of X. Then there's upstart, which is a fine thing if you're booting your system frequently, I guess. My system would run fine with good old SysV init, which I already know how to manage. And NetWorkManager, which insists on trying to start the wireless supplicant every 10 minutes, on my desktop system which has no wireless interface. I finally got rid of that. These are just a few examples.
The reason that so many modern distros are derived from Ubuntu is simple: they're doing it right.
Some things, yes.
Slackware was great back in the days when 16 megs of RAM made you a "power user", but it doesn't make much sense these days. Even the late-90s PCs I use for embedded work run Debian. I used to admin IBM mainframes back in the 1970s, and I would never go back to the days when your system maintenance tools didn't automatically check and manage dependencies for you.
I have nothing against good package managers, which is why I'd like to stay with something Debian-style.
If you want to limit yourself to fvwm
Fvwm is certainly not limiting for me. Hey, I can actually edit my .fvwmrc file, and find dox on exactly how to do it. Can you say the same for Gnome? Years ago, I wasted a lot of time working on getting my .gtkrc file set up to my taste -- never got there. The documentation sucks. And Gnome stuffs some config data in Gconf, some in other places. You can't find it all without a lot of work, and find documenation on it? Bah! When I switched back to Fvwm, my old .fvwmrc file was 90% still usable, and the supplied config upgrade script told me what parts were deprecated or invalid. I suppose if I wanted my windows to jiggle during desktop switches, Fvwm might be limiting.
(which I wouldn't: my philosophy for my "tool" systems is that the software is supposed to make things easy for me, not the hardware)
Well, now we're talking about something different, but yet again, a lot of this new stuff isn't making my life easier. When methods I know, which used to work, don't anymore, how is that "easier"? I have nothing against hardware abstraction. But I dislike byzantine XML files for configuring things.
there's official community documentation (as well as quite a few google hits for forum postings and other web resources) to make it easy for you.
Oh, sometimes. These days, finding an actual answer for an error message, using a web search, is more likely to come up with an steaming plethora of the same question, mirrored over and over, in multiple places, as it is to come up with useful debugging procedures.
Switching distros when you've got one as good as Ubuntu would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Well, "good" is in the eye of the beholder, eh? 
