Well there is going to be a Xubuntu 17.10 out soon so I decided to jump into the deep end with it and install it onto the second media computer (the one in my bedroom). To get the core edition you need the mini.iso for netboot, and while this isn't officially available for Artful, you can get it by searching the internet and in my case finding it from someone else's repository. Put it on a pen drive, boot from that and it is a text based install, eventually you get to the point where you are asked what to install and specify "Xubuntu minimal install". This installs XFCE and a minimal set of applications, so you don't get stuff you don't need, like LibreOffice.
I wanted to see, naturally, if video playback performance on this system has improved from 17.04, given that on 16.10 or 16.04 there were not the issues I have seen in 17.x releases. Although there was a small improvement the overall issue of slow or stuttery playback is still there. I'm guessing there may be a change in the video drivers from 16.x for the AMD video hardware in this computer and this may or may not be related to AMD dropping support for this particular chipset, or it may be that I have to hunt out alternatives to the drivers supplied with Xubuntu.
It didn't take a lot of work to install Firefox Developer, Chrome and Kodi, and then to copy stuff from the old user profile to the new one, so with not really much work post install everything in the system is working just as it was with the Zesty install. I don't really expect to save much resources from using the Core install instead of the regular full install. But it is good to see 17.10 is stable enough as a developer edition.
