I have been fond of lightweight window managers for some time. For a long time I’ve been using IceWM, but it has a trouble with the menu it didn’t want to generate new applications list at the time when they were installed, so I was seeking for a lightweight Desktop Environment instead and came accross LXDE. Actually it was installed at the time, when I gave the Raspberry PI as a replacement computer to my friend, so I navigated briefly through it and it seemed nice. The “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment” is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment. Maintained by an international community of developers, it comes with a beautiful interface, multi-language support, standard keyboard short cuts and additional features like tabbed file browsing. LXDE uses less CPU and less RAM than other environments. It is especially designed for cloud computers with low hardware specifications, such as netbooks, mobile devices (e.g. MIDs) or older computers. LXDE can be installed on many Linux distributions including Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu (Trisquel GNU/Linux in my case).
- The hardware requirements of LXDE are similiar to Windows 98 (Maybe a little bit higher). An old Pentium II CPU is enough.
- After X11 and LXDE are started, the total memory usage is about 45 MB on i386 machines. (This value may be higher or lower according to different system configurations.)
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