LXDE going mainstream

Nezmer · 2009-01-07 23:35:53

It's a good week for the LXDE project .

First , the project won the DistroWatch monthly donation .

December 2008 donation: LXDE receives US$250.00
We are pleased to announce that the recipient of the December 2008 DistroWatch.com donation is LXDE, a free and open source desktop environment.

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090105

Second , the Debian CD team made an interesting announcement :

The Debian CD team has made practical use of the extra time allowed for
the release of Lenny by implementing some late improvements of the CD and
DVD images available for Lenny.
With the addition of a tasksel task for the LXDE desktop environment [1],
Lenny will support the installation of four desktop environments:
- GNOME
- KDE
- LXDE
- Xfce

Xfce CD replaced by 'light desktop environments' CD
---------------------------------------------------
This CD supports the installation of either the Xfce or the LXDE desktop
environment. The image is named "xfce+lxde"; see for example [2].

All four desktop environments installable from first DVD
--------------------------------------------------------
The contents of the first DVD image have been adjusted so that all four
desktop environments can be installed using only the first DVD (i.e.
without using a network mirror or scanning additional DVDs).

http://teams.debian.net/lurker/message/ … 09.en.html

XFCE was always the third Desktop Environment . The DE that provided a lightweight user-friendly solution for those who didn't want to use Gnome or KDE .

Do you think the LXDE project will raise in popularity and become the 3rd standard DE in Linux Distributions ?

Why more & more people seem to prefer LXDE over XFCE ?

Is XFCE still an attractive lightweight solution ?

xaiviax · 2009-01-07 23:53:19

Good news for LXDE. I think LXDE is a great project, and feel the same about XFCE. I hardly see the need to start a LXDE vs XFCE flamewar though, focus on the pro LXDE aspects.

Nezmer · 2009-01-08 00:12:57

This is the 'Linux Discussion' sub-forum . Every topic can start a flamewar no matter what angel you try to focus on .

Last edited by Nezmer (2009-01-08 02:00:42)

ibendiben · 2009-01-08 00:17:07

Good to hear, I use Lxde by default as it's fast yet simple. Besides that, all parts WM(openbox), dock, filemanager (great!) etc. are separately usable! That should be a new trend setter imho.

Ranguvar · 2009-01-08 02:02:41

I use a WM by itself, but many LXDE apps are useful to me, as they always have very, very few dependencies Case in point being lxappearance. Great work, LXDE team!

buttons · 2009-01-08 02:33:22

Ranguvar wrote:

I use a WM by itself, but many LXDE apps are useful to me, as they always have very, very few dependencies Case in point being lxappearance. Great work, LXDE team!

This.

lxappearance is pure gold.

kensai · 2009-01-08 02:38:44

I think LXDE is a better XFCE, since is lighter, and provides the same functionality. XFCE feels to me too much of a GNOME ripoff, so instead of choosing XFCE I always choose GNOME, but LXDE is another story, is so light, and so great. I highly recommend it.

Sander Hoksbergen · 2009-01-08 10:15:43

LXDE is IMO, a very nice DE, though it lacks a bit of finesse(It resembles Windows a bit, ew). Each part of it on it's own (lxappearance, pcmanfm) is just great
I suppose that in a year or so we'll see more and more of LXDE.

Last edited by Sander Hoksbergen (2009-01-08 10:16:50)

Army · 2009-01-08 11:11:39

Some months ago I switched from LXDE to XFCE. What I really love in XFCE is, that I can open the system menu via shortkey. Is that possible with LXDE as well? And XFCE can be made very beautiful, LXDE is much more ugly imho, Openbox is great for its speed, but doesn't make my eyes very happy. I know, Openbox can be replaced by any other WM.

Nezmer · 2009-01-08 12:17:28

Army wrote:

Some months ago I switched from LXDE to XFCE. What I really love in XFCE is, that I can open the system menu via shortkey. Is that possible with LXDE as well?

Have a look at lxpanelctl .

For key bindings , It's done the same way as openbox but the config file is '.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml' .

Dieter@be · 2009-01-08 12:26:33

xfce has too many 'own' things (like configuration managament, automounter etc etc), unlike lxde which has no deps other then glibc or whatever.
Also, I dislike xfce putting garbage in my $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

That said, xfce is good for beginners who want lightweight and are not as pedantic about their ~ as i am.

iBertus · 2009-01-08 12:28:46

This project does look promising. I've always just used GNOME if I wanted a DE and awesome or FVWM if just a window manager. PCManFM is my favorite standalone file manager. I haven't had a whole lot of time lately to roll my own desktop, so just been using default GNOME settings.

kgas · 2009-01-08 14:25:14

I am currently stick to LXDE. It is simple and light weight. IMHO in Linux there are plenty of choices for WM and DE and the selection is purly on individual taste and usage. http://xwinman.org/intro.php this link will give a good idea for GNU/Linux beginners about the choices of WM and DE.

dunc · 2009-01-08 20:24:38

I used to like Xfce, but it has definitely become "heavier" over the years. LXDE is still lighter than Xfce ever was, but it's very good, and in a way probably the most properly Linux-esque DE around, in that for the most part it's a collection of pre-existing tools each doing one job well rather than a unified DE in the KDE/Xfce sense. I like it a lot, even though I use a custom Openbox/ROX setup myself; LXAppearance has certainly become my default font/icon/GTK theme switcher.

Definitely a good starting point for a fresh install on a low-end machine.

Misfit138 · 2009-01-08 22:05:33

I'm less about customization and more about getting the thing up and running nowadays.
I prefer Xfce, but LXDE has some appeal too; a nice way to get a pretty complete Openbox system installed quick.

Jeffers0n · 2009-01-08 23:44:13

I use XFCE on my desktop (640MB RAM, old Athlon XP) and LXDE on my EEEpc 900A. I like both of them, but I find that LXDE is still a little rough around the edges, while XFCE seems more complete. I like openbox as my WM and I like how LXDE feels so far, but I think it still needs another year of development before it becomes as robust as XFCE.

ozar · 2009-01-08 23:47:33

Jeffers0n wrote:

I like both of them, but I find that LXDE is still a little rough around the edges, while XFCE seems more complete.

My feelings exactly.

I'm looking forward to further refinements of both, but especially LXDE. In fact, I'd like to see LXDE progress to the point that it makes its way into the "extra" repo.

Allan · 2009-01-09 03:01:40

I use XFCE because I am a lazy but want a light-weight environment.

Army · 2009-01-09 13:34:56

Yesterday I installed and started LXDE naked (no conky, no nothing in autostart, imply by exec startlxde in .xinitrc) and it used a little bit more RAM than XFCE! Guess what, I'm back with XFCE and I think I'll stay Still, LXDE is really very good, but for me XFCE is better. It's really great, that LXDE needs almost no dependencies for its components. But to me lightweight is defined by RAM usage.

Last edited by Army (2009-01-09 13:35:13)

Nezmer · 2009-01-10 00:56:37

Army wrote:

Yesterday I installed and started LXDE naked (no conky, no nothing in autostart, imply by exec startlxde in .xinitrc) and it used a little bit more RAM than XFCE!

I don't buy this story

you had 'exec startlxde' to start a full blown lxde session . What did you have for xfce ?
I assume you share the same autostart apps in all your sessions (you have nothing in '~/.config/autostart/' ?)

Last edited by Nezmer (2009-01-10 00:59:11)

Army · 2009-01-10 02:03:27

Ok, let me be a bit more precise (I wrote it a little bit wrong last time, my apologies!):
At normal usage of XFCE, I had exec startxfce4 in .xinitrc and conky + xbindkeys being started by XFCE. What I forgot to mention was, that I use the svn version of xfce, so it's more like 4.6 than 4.4. After the boot I had a RAM usage of a little less than 100MB (about 99 or so). Then I removed everything in .config, except of autostart, which also included some *.desktop files of XFCE things, I told XFCE not to load. So I removed every *.desktop file except of conky and xbindkeys. I also deleted .cache and all the other stuff, which can be removed without big harm. Then I installed LXDE, removed XFCE and changed the .xinitrc file. After a reboot conky showed a RAM usage of a little bit more than 100MB (about 101 or so). Seems strange to me as well, but that's how it is! Now that I switched back to XFCE I suddenly need about 102MB or so, don't really know, what the reason for that might be, but when they use equal amount of RAM, I still prefer XFCE, it's nicer in my opinion, sometimes faster, sometimes maybe slower, but it's really nice here!
When we used to have the older version of xorg, I had a RAM usage of about 60MB after the boot process... I miss that a little bit

Could please someone else do a comparisation? I really think that this is strange here! Is LXDE really supposed to be _much_ lighter than XFCE?

Last edited by Army (2009-01-10 02:05:13)

venky80 · 2009-01-25 23:10:25

i am in the power group but i do not get shutdown suspend options ..i only get logout
I am using gamil lxde and slim

Nezmer · 2009-01-25 23:18:22

venky80 wrote:

i am in the power group but i do not get shutdown suspend options ..i only get logout
I am using gamil lxde and slim

Is 'hal' running ?

venky80 · 2009-01-26 04:11:29

yes i have has in my daemons list ...how can i verify if it is running?

Army · 2009-01-26 07:59:14

ls /var/run/daemons/

Outputs every running daemon

Arch Linux

#1 2009-01-07 23:35:53

LXDE going mainstream

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Re: LXDE going mainstream

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