
"Mainstream Linux distributions typically default to one of two desktop environments, KDE or GNOME. Both of these environments provide users with an intuitive and attractive desktop, as well as offering a large raft of multimedia software, games, administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, artwork, web development tools and more. However, these two desktops focus more on providing users with a modern computing environment with all the bells and whistles featured in Windows Vista, rather than minimising the amount of system resources they need. For users and developers who want to run an attractive Linux desktop on older hardware, netbooks, or mobile internet devices, neither KDE or GNOME may be a viable option, as they run too slowly on low spec machines (such as less than 256MB RAM and a 1 GHz processor). This article seeks to
identify the best lean desktops for Linux, for users that have old or even ancient hardware."
Member since:
2006-11-17
I disagree with XFCE being in that list.
I've been testing it on my FreeBSD 7.0 RELEASE and it takes exactly the same time to launch than GNOME (24 ~ 26 seconds) and the applications boot up as fast as they do in GNOME.
Even more, as a matter of compatibility, some other apps (I remember evince right now) takes two or three times more time than it does in GNOME. I checked the memory consumption but I don't remember the numbers so I can't say anything for sure.
I really didn't find any reason to switch from GNOME to XFCE
Similar issues can be found with e17 (also tested on FreeBSD 7.0 RELEASE). Firefox 3 miserably crashes on boot up (window freezes forever).
But please, don't get me wrong, they are very good alternatives, though probably a list of drawbacks, beside the list of features would have been healthy.
Cheers