We’re all pretty much versed in the worlds of GNOME, KDE, and to a lesser degree, Xfce, and while there are lots of alternatives, none of the smaller ones really seem to gain much traction beyond their fans. An exception is LXDE, a small and resource efficient desktop environment.
The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, or LXDE as it’s more commonly known, really takes its “lightweightness” seriously. They claim that LXDE’s minimum hardware specifications are only slightly higher than that of Windows 98, consuming only 45MB of memory after boot. Any Pentium II processor should be capable enough of running LXDE, and thanks to it being ported to ARM and MIPS as well, it can serve a whole range of machines, like the Chinese MIPS netbooks.
The LXDE interface is attractive but simple, more or less similar to Windows’ Classic interface. It comes with a whole set of basic utilities and configuration tools, so LXDE really stands on its own two feet. It’s installable on most modern Linux distributions, with some of them even releasing specific versions with LXDE or some of its components.
Due to the success of LXDE, there’s even talk of an official Ubuntu derivative, Lubuntu. In an interview, LXDE president Mario Behling detailed how he met Mark Shuttleworth to talk about this possibility. “Mark is pretty nice and he understood immediately, that LXDE as a desktop environment could be the base for an official derivate. This was only an initial talk and we need to understand that there is still a long way to go. The conversation was mainly about how we could work together as a community,” Behling explains. As of yet, however, there is no financial commitment from Canonical.
It seems like LXDE has the possibility of becoming the desktop environment of choice for resource-constrained machines. I have several Pentium II machines that would perform pretty good with LXDE as their desktops, and I must say, t has become a tempting idea.
XFCE was “small and resource efficient”?
XFCE is still small and resource efficient in IMHO, particularly in comparision to the other DEs like Gnome and KDE.
It certainly starts up fast and provides a responsive desktop that doesn’t consume too much in the way of memory and cpu power. Also, the source code is fairly small, and doesn’t have too many dependencies so is easy to compile.
I think some people mistakenly think XFCE is slow, without realising they are loading the Gnome or KDE libs during the startup as part of their restored session.
I remember when it was basically a mimic of CDE 🙂
This was the times of XFCE 3. In fact, you could run a quite functional and easy to use desktop system using XFCE 3, of course while adding other lightweight applications (at this time), such as mplayer, Opera, XMMS, OpenOffice 1, xpdf and others.
History: I had to support customers who wanted “CDE like on the Sun”, so I took some time and configured a XFCE 3 system for them. “Wow! How could you port CDE to this x86 machine?” 🙂
XFCE can still be set up to work like CDE…in fact, that’s the setup I’m running now. Delete the top panel, change the bottom panel’s size to 48 pixels and center it, set the desktop to show minimized icons, and it will show the application menu on a right-click. I find this is most efficient, since I can have my most frequently used applications in the launcher, and anything else I can right click to get the applications menu. So the ability to emulate CDE still exists, it’s just buried underneath the “Gnome emulation” default.
Right now, between the three major desktop environments, XFCE is the most usable in terms of being fast and configurable, and it’s really not even close.
You can still do that?
Darn, I should try Xfce one of these days.
Yep. These features were missing when XFCE moved to 4.0, but due to popular demand, it returned around 4.2 (how’s that for listening to your users). It’s not exactly the GTK equivalent of CDE, but more like a modern interpretation…complete with antialiased fonts, the beauty of Gtk themes, and compositing features like transparency and shadows. I always thought that minimize to desktop was superior to using a taskbar for various reasons. I guess that makes us the minority of computer users these days.
I’m with you there, although I do like the xfce icon box also. I’ve always liked CDE, sad to see it on its way out (or already gone, haven’t looked in the latest sol 10 versions) from Solaris.
I never used CDE, but you just described the exact setup I used when I was running Xfce.
No, in xfce3 you could cover the panel with windows. In the current version, you can’t. You can in KDE. That’s why I stopped using it. I want to be able to be able to cover the panel like I can even with CDE.
Good catch, I never noticed this before since I never like to cover the panel. A quick workaround that I’ve found is to right-click the titlebar of the app you are running, and select “Always on Top.” Not the most intuitive solution, especially if you want this to be the default behavior for all windows, but it’s there. There might be a way to treat the panel like other windows and select “Always Below Other Windows” but I haven’t found it.
Still the most customizable of the three major desktop environments….just try to bind the applications menu to a right-click in KDE 4x.
I tried that and the window you make stay on top stay on top…any other windows opened after opens under it.
Chani Armitage’s GSoC project is about making the desktop right click menu customisable: http://chani.wordpress.com/category/soc/“