Lightweight D.E Suggestion

[chasha420]

Hey guys, I've been thinking about going for a desktop environment in Sabayon that is light weight & less resource hungry.

Well gnome is doing fine on my Desktop & that is okay, but my old laptop (dell inspiron) has 1 GB ram, core2duo & is not that high end...therefore I was considering switching to another D.E from Gnome.

So these are the options that I'm considering: LXDE, E17, XFCE.

I didn't quite like XFCE much back when I've used it on Ubuntu, but anyway I am open to any suggestions, etc. Also I've tried lxde in the past & I was amazed at it's lightning speed & so pretty much it's a choice between LXDE & E17. I'm not considering going too minimal like Fluxbox/Openbox cos it would make it unusable for members of my family

Anyway, it would also help me understand some what better if anyone who has used the above D.E(s) could tell me from their experience as to what is the default filemanager & min. ram usage under such D.E would be like; and I plan on using compiz as the window manager....what would it's performance be, etc.

[wolfden]

I like LXDE over e17. e17 has that cool look to it, but I find it's app are terrible. As far as I know, e17 and compiz was not an easy task to do. It may be different now and I'm not sure if compiz works with lxde. If you wanted to stay light weight, I wouldn't be concerned with compiz.

xfce has made some big strides, definitely worth trying it out

[Matte88]

I like LXDE over e17.

Yeah wolfden! LXDE is my favourite choiche for lightweight DE.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Having dabbled with all three (and with LXDE and E17 currently installed on a couple of my machines), here's my opinion, for what it's worth:

Order of 'leaness', leanest first: LXDE, E17, Xfce

Order of 'feature set richness', most feature-rich first: Xfce, E17, LXDE

Order of 'snappy response', snappiest first: LXDE, E17, Xfce

Order of 'good looks', coolest-looking first: E17, Xfce, LXDE

Order of ease of configuration, easiest first: LXDE, Xfce, E17

Order of 'maturity', most mature first: Xfce, E17, LXDE

The Wikipedia articles are quite informative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lxde

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfce

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenm ... ow_manager

as are the home pages:

http://lxde.org/

http://www.xfce.org/

http://www.enlightenment.org/

[chasha420]

Thanks a lot Fitzcarraldo & Wolfden, that was really helpful.

I guess I'll have to try it out & decide for myself.

[ReemZ]

Good topic chasha420, thanks for starting it.
Guess this would be the perfect place to ask my questions, as I plan to look into E17 and XFCE (and now LXDE too) but having trouble finding the right packages.
equo search enlightenment gives me versions 1.0.6 and 9999, equo install enlightenment --ask --verbose wants to install 9999, but I have no idea if this is the correct one as I'm not sure where the huge difference in version numbers comes from.
equo search xfce gives 64 results
Going through the list I'm guessing xfce4-meta-4.8 would be the package of choice, but I'm not sure (it'd probably end up pulling all 64 packages anyway )
equo search lxde gives "only" 16 results, I'm guessing lxde-meta-0.5.0-r5 would be the package to install, but again I'm not sure.
Little nudge please?

[Fitzcarraldo]

Code: Select all

equo install enlightenment-9999

Code: Select all

equo install xfce4-meta

Code: Select all

equo install lxde-meta

If you were installing onto a system without any DE then you'd probably want to use a set instead:

Code: Select all

equo install @<name of set>

but the sets install other stuff too, which will already be installed on your PC if you are already using e.g. KDE (see Sabayon Git Repositories/projects/overlay.git/sets/tree and click on the 'raw' link for each set to see the packages in each set).

[ReemZ]

Do you ever sleep, Fitz?
So I did find the right packages after all then, thanks mate!

Time...to play...

[Fitzcarraldo]

Do you ever sleep, Fitz?

[ReemZ]