It is a mystery

Well, I don't get into the guts of my OS so can't speak to that. Basically for me, Xubuntu is like, oh, maybe WinXP: settings I can fiddle with to get things to work mostly the way I want and then software that does the things I want without too much of someone getting in the way and insisting that no, I have to do something simple all weighted down with enterprise features. And a much better update system that lets you review what is on offer and schedule it for later if you need to. I used to have Xubuntu on one machine at the library in amongst the Win boxes (I put it on a donated machine that was so underpowered that it took 20 minutes to boot XP, but "donated" was our budget) and most people never even noticed. All of which isn't to try to convince you, but simply to note that the experience of using it isn't quite the bad old command-line-only days, but rather a pretty usable-out-of-the-box gui.