Comment Re:Why I don't use it (Score 4, Informative) 435
ubuntu-desktop is just a metapackage that has dependencies to basically all desktop apps that are installed by default in Ubuntu (so that for example if you do a minimal install you can later on just do a "desktop installation" later on very easily (e.g. sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop). So you can remove ubuntu-desktop safely and everything will work just fine (which you would find out also if you read the package description of gnome-desktop).
Also, one particularly useful feature I've found with ubuntu/debian package handling is in cases where you need/want a slightly newer version of an application that's not yet available in the repositories with the version you want, you can do "sudo apt-get build-dep foobar" and then very easily compile your foobar yourself without having to worry about finding every header package that you need for compiling the app (something I find incredibly annoying on e.g. RHEL). Also, you can for most of the time install debian unstable packages as well if you're very impatient with getting packages not yet available for ubuntu.
Also, one particularly useful feature I've found with ubuntu/debian package handling is in cases where you need/want a slightly newer version of an application that's not yet available in the repositories with the version you want, you can do "sudo apt-get build-dep foobar" and then very easily compile your foobar yourself without having to worry about finding every header package that you need for compiling the app (something I find incredibly annoying on e.g. RHEL). Also, you can for most of the time install debian unstable packages as well if you're very impatient with getting packages not yet available for ubuntu.
