I have a Dell XPS M1210 with a Nvidia 7400GO and 3GB of RAM. I would like to run Ubuntu again but I have found it to be sluggish and slow with Unity, Even the Gnome Fallback seems sluggish. I don't know if it is simple as a drive problem or if it is 13.04. I remember that everything seemed fine with 12.04.
Should I go back to the LTS of Ubuntu or should I stick it out? Can anyone recommend a less resource intensive desktop environment?
Xubuntu uses the XFCE desktop, which is much less resource intensive. Everything else about the distro is pretty straightforward Ubuntu; packages are part of the regular Ubuntu release, so nearly every howto applies
If you want a more minimalistic desktop and still stay within the Ubuntu distros, try Lubuntu which uses LXDE. This is even slimmer than XFCE, but also much more "stripped down" than the other desktops.
I have the same laptop, albeit slightly less powerful - 2gb ram, Intel graphics, etc - and just underwent that exact exercise.
Long story short, I ended up throwing a SSD in it and replaced the dead optical drive with the original HD, and it now flies - I'll double my RAM now and put off buying an Air for a little bit longer.
Ubuntu 12.04 is my recomendation for you!
