I'd like to ask around here which one you prefer on the AA1. I used F11 XFCE for quite a long time ans switched to F12 XFCE when it came around. IMHO F11 is very stable on the AA1. F12 is a different thing. it started with Anaconda refusing to install without swap. being somewhat more speedier I encounter strange things after periodical updates loosing my panel and desktop icons, loosing NFS connection to my home network. only solution for now is making another user account and deleting the original one. like to know your experiences, don't hesitate to share your opinion on the best Fx for the AA1... Meine
I'm running F13 and Rawhide LXDE. No obvious problems. I don't have a swap partition, so I guess the lack thereof was not a barrier to installation. Instead of creating a new user account, you might try just moving the configuration files out of the way (or renaming them) to see if that clears up some of your problems. Not sure where XFCE is storing its config files these days, but I'd look in ~/.config
tried that but didn't resolve the problem. until now it happened twice. last night I got F13 LXDE and want to give it a serious try. KDE looks nice but I guess it's too much for the AA1 SSD.