Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 1st Dec 2008 23:31 UTC, submitted by linuxlinks
"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."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Or is it to use as little resources as possilbe for the DE to be able to use the applications?
Basically, yea. On my old laptop I found that running the latest firefox under Gnome or KDE would get quite sluggish after a while, while running it under fluxbox worked a lot better.
Sure there are more lightweight browsers out there that I could have used, but I used firefox everywhere else, and for consistency sake I wanted it on my laptop as well. So when faced with the choice of giving up Gnome for fluxbox, and giving up firefox for some lightweight browser, I chose to go with fluxbox (which I quite like anyway...)
Member since:
2006-12-18
Well, the title may seem a bit harsh, but it's not.. really
I have always wondered this: If you use a lightweight DE, then why why why use ALOT of heavy apps? Firefox(flash, java), kde-apps, gnome-apps?
I mean, If I have a system that is low on memory, then I use a DE that uses little memory, so far im fine with this. BUT what happens when you start loading a lot of KDE apps? k3b, konqueror dolphin etc? you load a lot of kde and qt libraries in memory as well? Isnt that kind of defeating the purpous of running a low-resource system?
Or is it to use as little resources as possilbe for the DE to be able to use the applications?
Sure, lightweight DEs are a good thing, I used to use fluxbox alot before i fell in love with konqueror(in kde 3.5.x at least) with its versatility(spelling?)... Sure I could use konqueror in fluxbox, but then I needed space on HDD and RAM for some kde-apps and libs. So, Just as well I could use a trimmed down KDE