What's your set up? I mean, hardware. I've found that the best approach seems to be building your own thing up, at least it's worked for me; no unwanted/undesired programs but only those ones I will use, like and need. For instance, I've installed Q4OS plasma version and at the desktop profiler at boot chose the developer/minimal mode, which installed a minimal set of apps; konsole, dolphin, konqueror and kwrite. Then I added my owns
Code:
sudo apt-get install vlc clementine chromium claws-mail ark kolourpaint calligra okular gwenview ncdu partitionmanager bleachbit zim kate imagemagick aria2 pcsxr
I've added a few others when needed. So, don't know but like I told you in another thread maybe you should try using VMs, it's quite fun actually and you'll learn lots of stuff. Install virtualbox, create a couple or as many as you want, I have 6 at the moment running different distros and even a windows one to run some apps that don't work in wine. I have a litlle proyect too; using an Ubuntu minimal iso, I want to build a system combining diferent ppas from as many as possible Ubuntu's derivatives; Linux Lite (this one is a great distro, everything worked out of the box when I tried it. Really recommended and it's fool proof) Lubuntu, Xubuntu, etc, etc ... I don't know whether or not that'll work but I'm just curious about that. Next, I think to try the same thing with Debian.